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

Alexandre Oliva
2007-06-17T18:45:37Z

On Jun 17, 2007, Bernd Schmidt <bernds_cb1@t-online.de> wrote:

> Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> On Jun 17, 2007, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>>> No. You've explained one thing only: that you cannot see that people don't
>>> *agree* on the "spirit".
>>
>> They don't have to.
>>
>> Just like nobody but you can tell why you chose the GPLv2, nobody but
>> RMS can tell why he wrote the GPL. And the intent behind writing the
>> GPL is what defines its spirit.

> Given that a number of people who don't buy into FSF ideology (let's
> call them "open source proponents" to contrast them with the "free
> software people") have concluded that the GPLv2 achieves their personal
> goals, and have chosen the GPLv2 as the license for their projects, I'd
> argue that the spirit that is embodied in the GPLv2 is actually a larger
> thing than what the FSF intended, and more inclusive.

This sounds like a good argument, but it doesn't hold water.

Consider this: We manufacture bread toasters and sell them in the
market with great success. They're big and bulky. So the engineers
work on reducing its size, but in a way they can still fit perfectly a
slice of bread. When we launch bread toaster, people complain that
this new product cannot toast bagels any more, that we've changed the
spirit of the bread toaster.

See? Just because you could use it for other purposes doesn't make
the intent behind it any different.

> When these same people now disagree with the GPLv3, it indicates that
> something has been lost, and the spirit of the _license_ has changed.

It just shows that they've never agreed with the spirit of the license
in the first place. They just saw it could do something else, and
used it for this reason. There's nothing wrong about this.

What's wrong is to complain that those who introduced the license with
a specific and public intent, and that advancing that intent with a
new revision of the license, are changing the intent.

--
Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}