02.13.08
Quick Mention: Eric Raymond Tried to Persuade Linus Torvalds to Choose GPLv3
Buried somewhere in this new interview there is the following interesting bit from Eric Raymond, who is not exactly a role model for Free software.
Biancuzzi: What about GPL3 then?
Raymond: It’s another reciprocal license. Better written in some ways than GPL2; I had a long email conversation with Linus in which I tried to persude him to adopt it, my goal being to reduce the amount of political crap flying around in the community.
This is particularly noteworthy because Torvalds appears to have softened since the issue was first raised. In fact, given Sun’s direction (with yet another acquisition yesterday), the kernel might have to follow suit and upgrade the licence in order to compete. This hypotectical question was brought up in the mailing lists before and it only recently Torvalds showed some envy or fear of OpenSolaris, which is most likely bound to embrace GPLv3 (perhaps with duality in licensing).
Elsewhere, in the 451 Group’s Web site, a new technical report about the GPLv3 is now available.
We’ve just released our latest CAOS report, GPLv3-Liberation or limitation?, which covers the changes and implications of the new version of the GNU General Public License.
It might be worth providing feedback on this report to have it improved or at least augmented with peripheral comments. Nevertheless, the report resides behind a moneywall. How 90s. Don’t people write reports to reach a large audience? The Burton Group, which is a friend of Microsoft, adopted a similar route, perhaps in order to keep all by the wealthy away, thereby reducing criticism of a propaganda piece whitepaper. █
