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> why hasn't Torwalds spawned a Linux license he's fully on board with? Changing a licence in an open source project can be difficult. Unless you've specifical

> why hasn't Torwalds spawned a Linux license he's fully on board with? Changing a licence in an open source project can be difficult. Unless you've specifically had all contributors sign away their ownership of their contribution, then you can't change the licence without their permission, as they've only given permission for their contribution to be used under the current licence. When you have 1000s of contributors, the problem swiftly becomes impractical to solve. I'm not aware of whether the linux kernel asks contributors to give up their rights in such a way, or otherwise has some provision for changing the licence terms.

m_mueller 11y ago
I can see that. Here's why I think it could work nonetheless: (1) Torwalds is one of the people able to drum up the OSS community. If people hated him so much as to not follow him on a technical detail, they'd develop for BSD rather than Linux. (2) the reason GPLv3 has mostly failed seems to be mostly due to the controversial nature of the changes while the change for more compatibility with another free license seems straightforward
- deleted 11y ago
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- ryao 11y ago
  If standards are followed and cross platform libraries are used for functionality absent from the standards, userland software should work equally well on various platforms. An enormous amount of software available for Linux already does that.
- Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 11y ago
  Mozilla relicensed code from 445 contributors (from MPL-only to MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license). It took them 5 years [1]. Consider complications like finding the relatives of a dead contributor, getting them to listen to you, then to understand the issue, then to agree. The Linux codebase is much older and has accumulated more contributors over that time, so the task is much larger, too. 1: http://blog.gerv.net/2006/03/relicensing_complete/ http://blog.gerv.net/2006/03/relicensing_complete/
- bobpaul 11y ago
  Torvald's has said in the past he won't ever change the license of Linux. The GPL normally has a clause that says the source code has to be licensed under "this license or a newer version of the GPL". Projects that have moved from GPLv2 to GPLv3 did so because of this clause in the license. Torvalds specifically removed this clause. I doubt Torvalds is concerned about whether or not users can use ZFS. He's defended the existence of closed source kernel modules (ex graphics drivers, network drivers). There's even the quote in the article that Torvald's didn't consider Andrew File System derivative of the kernel. Further, users can use ZFS-FUSE; there's no question that ZFS-FUSE doesn't infringe. Finally, Oracle owns sole copyright to ZFS; they can re-licence it. Linux will never move from GPLv2 and I'd be really surprised if Torvalds saw the ZFS issue as a problem with the GPLv2 and not an Oracle problem.
  - m_mueller 11y ago
    Thanks, good answer. Is Torvalds legally correct with his defence of non-GPL kernel modules? I mean his position makes total sense to me technically, I just find it a bit strange that he wouldn't push for an OSS license that unambiguously allows for such kernel modules, s.t. everyone could shut up about this issue. I also understand though if his position is that it's just not a problem that needs to be solved (since he doesn't think that contributors would end up suing distributors about this issue).

m_mueller 11y ago

I can see that. Here's why I think it could work nonetheless: (1) Torwalds is one of the people able to drum up the OSS community. If people hated him so much as to not follow him on a technical detail, they'd develop for BSD rather than Linux. (2) the reason GPLv3 has mostly failed seems to be mostly due to the controversial nature of the changes while the change for more compatibility with another free license seems straightforward

deleted 11y ago
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ryao 11y ago
If standards are followed and cross platform libraries are used for functionality absent from the standards, userland software should work equally well on various platforms. An enormous amount of software available for Linux already does that.
Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 11y ago
Mozilla relicensed code from 445 contributors (from MPL-only to MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license). It took them 5 years [1]. Consider complications like finding the relatives of a dead contributor, getting them to listen to you, then to understand the issue, then to agree. The Linux codebase is much older and has accumulated more contributors over that time, so the task is much larger, too. 1: http://blog.gerv.net/2006/03/relicensing_complete/ http://blog.gerv.net/2006/03/relicensing_complete/
bobpaul 11y ago
Torvald's has said in the past he won't ever change the license of Linux. The GPL normally has a clause that says the source code has to be licensed under "this license or a newer version of the GPL". Projects that have moved from GPLv2 to GPLv3 did so because of this clause in the license. Torvalds specifically removed this clause. I doubt Torvalds is concerned about whether or not users can use ZFS. He's defended the existence of closed source kernel modules (ex graphics drivers, network drivers). There's even the quote in the article that Torvald's didn't consider Andrew File System derivative of the kernel. Further, users can use ZFS-FUSE; there's no question that ZFS-FUSE doesn't infringe. Finally, Oracle owns sole copyright to ZFS; they can re-licence it. Linux will never move from GPLv2 and I'd be really surprised if Torvalds saw the ZFS issue as a problem with the GPLv2 and not an Oracle problem.
- m_mueller 11y ago
  Thanks, good answer. Is Torvalds legally correct with his defence of non-GPL kernel modules? I mean his position makes total sense to me technically, I just find it a bit strange that he wouldn't push for an OSS license that unambiguously allows for such kernel modules, s.t. everyone could shut up about this issue. I also understand though if his position is that it's just not a problem that needs to be solved (since he doesn't think that contributors would end up suing distributors about this issue).