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FWIW the situation is not quite as bad as Linus implies. He may personally dislike GPL3 but that doesn't appear to reflect the opinions of the entire project. A

FWIW the situation is not quite as bad as Linus implies. He may personally dislike GPL3 but that doesn't appear to reflect the opinions of the entire project. A license analysis of the current mainline Linux source shows that roughly 30%-40% files in the kernel are already GPL3 compatible because they're either licensed as GPL-2.0-or-later or dual licensed as MIT or BSD. (I don't have exact statistics on this, it's a rough estimate from a non-exhaustive SPDX audit. You can reproduce by simply grepping through the source for license identifiers) This can happen because individual kernel developers can contribute using whatever license they like as long as it's compatible with GPL2 for a binary distribution. Additionally, Linus and several other kernel developers did decide to adopt the termination provisions from GPL3 not too long ago [0]. Based on this, I don't think it's accurate to say that the kernel developers are currently opposed on the whole to GPL3, or at least to some of the ideas in it anyway. If the stance of some developers was "we'll upgrade the license if you remove all the extra provisions except the termination ones" then it seems obvious why that is a no-go from the perspective of everyone else. [0]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/kernel-enforcement-statement.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/kernel-enforc...

jancsika 6y ago
To be clear-- I didn't get the sense from Linus' rant that he's opposed to GPLv3 at all. His beef seemed to be with a discussion with the FSF about compatibility of licenses. From what I gathered from the rant: * Linus made clear to the FSF that he wanted a license for the Linux kernel that did not include the anti-tivoization clause. His desire as I understand it is that his project gives a licensee the code, they give back changes to the code, and that is as far as he wants the license to go. GPLv2 is a perfect fit for that. (Aside from whatever legal desiderata is required for such a license to be practical/sensible in the first place to achieve this, and I'm assuming that's what those two clauses you quoted are about.) * Linus claims the FSF told him he could "invalidate the tivoization clause" as a solution to his stated goals. But, according to Linus, that would create a mess since someone could fork and write drivers under the full GPLv3 (which is compatible with the version that doesn't contain the tivoization clause), and as Linus states, "Where does that leave me?" He could end up in situations Linux is unable to accept the changes without asking the driver writer to re-license the thing under GPLv3-minus-tivoization for upstream inclusion. (Furthermore, the more popular GPLv3 becomes, the worse this problem would get!) But his whole purpose in GPLv2 was to make a simple "code-goes-out-and-changes-come-back-in" deal with other developers, end of story. So that clearly doesn't fit his use case. * His central claim isn't that GPLv3 is bad, or even that GPLv3 doesn't fit his needs. Rather, he claims that FSF misrepresented the license and its compatibility with the GPLv2 in their discussion with him behind closed doors. Of course that's just his allegation, and I haven't seen an email chain to confirm anything. But that allegation alone is enough to call into question the idea that the history of GPLv3 adoption is only scary due to FUD from companies.
- tytso 6y ago
  There were a lot more concerns than just that. I refer you to: https://lwn.net/Articles/200422/ https://lwn.net/Articles/200422/

jancsika 6y ago

To be clear-- I didn't get the sense from Linus' rant that he's opposed to GPLv3 at all. His beef seemed to be with a discussion with the FSF about compatibility of licenses. From what I gathered from the rant: * Linus made clear to the FSF that he wanted a license for the Linux kernel that did not include the anti-tivoization clause. His desire as I understand it is that his project gives a licensee the code, they give back changes to the code, and that is as far as he wants the license to go. GPLv2 is a perfect fit for that. (Aside from whatever legal desiderata is required for such a license to be practical/sensible in the first place to achieve this, and I'm assuming that's what those two clauses you quoted are about.) * Linus claims the FSF told him he could "invalidate the tivoization clause" as a solution to his stated goals. But, according to Linus, that would create a mess since someone could fork and write drivers under the full GPLv3 (which is compatible with the version that doesn't contain the tivoization clause), and as Linus states, "Where does that leave me?" He could end up in situations Linux is unable to accept the changes without asking the driver writer to re-license the thing under GPLv3-minus-tivoization for upstream inclusion. (Furthermore, the more popular GPLv3 becomes, the worse this problem would get!) But his whole purpose in GPLv2 was to make a simple "code-goes-out-and-changes-come-back-in" deal with other developers, end of story. So that clearly doesn't fit his use case. * His central claim isn't that GPLv3 is bad, or even that GPLv3 doesn't fit his needs. Rather, he claims that FSF misrepresented the license and its compatibility with the GPLv2 in their discussion with him behind closed doors. Of course that's just his allegation, and I haven't seen an email chain to confirm anything. But that allegation alone is enough to call into question the idea that the history of GPLv3 adoption is only scary due to FUD from companies.

tytso 6y ago
There were a lot more concerns than just that. I refer you to: https://lwn.net/Articles/200422/ https://lwn.net/Articles/200422/