Re: Dual-Licensing Linux Kernel with GPL V2 and GPL V3

Rob Landley
2007-06-15T17:27:52Z

On Friday 15 June 2007 04:54:12 Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> David Schwartz wrote :
> > The GPL is about having the legal right to modify the software and
> being
> > able to put other people's distributed improvements back into the
> > original code base. It does not guarantee that you will actually be
> able
> > to modify the software and get it to work on some particular hardware.
>
> This is obviously wrong.
>
> Need I remind everyone the "origin" of the GNU movement is RMS getting
> a buggy printer driver from its manufacturer, and finding out he had
> no way to fix it? What use would RMS have had for putting other
> people's distributed improvements back into the original code base and
> not being allowed to get his printer to work? (And yes driver was
> os-side but only because devices had little computing capabilities
> then. Nowadays a lot of this very same stuff happens on the
> DRM-protected flashable firmware)

Er, yes and no.

The GPL evolved from the "Emacs License", and _that_ was heavily influenced by
Stallman's fight with James Gosling over Gosling revoking permission to use
Gosmacs code in GNU Emacs after Gosling sold his codebase to a commercial
entity.

http://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/

The GNU project and the GPL are two separate things, as are the GNU project
and GCC. (You can use GCC on MacOS X, AIX, and Windows. It doesn't make the
existence of those operating systems the result of the GNU project. Neither
is Linux, although there's a case for Linux being the result of the ABSENCE
of an actual operating system coming out of the Gnu project after a decade of
work...)

Rob
--
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
- Ken Thompson.