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

Rob Landley
2007-06-15T01:49:25Z

On Thursday 14 June 2007 19:18:12 Carlo Wood wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 01:09:46PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > I'm the original author, and I selected the GPLv2 for Linux.
>
> [...]
>
> > I'm not going to bother discussing this any more. You don't seem to
> > respect my right to choose the license for my own code.
>
> This is the main reason I dislike GPLwhatever: there is no notion
> of "orginal author". You might have written 99% of the code, that
> doesn't matter. You have no rights whatsoever once you release
> something under the GPL (no more than ANYOne else).

You mean if the original author gets hit by a bus and their estate gets sold
to SCO they can't revoke our rights to the code? How is this a down side?

And you do have more rights than anyone else: as the copyright holder you can
issue other licenses, and you have standing to sue to enforce the code. (If
nobody else has a copyright on the code, they don't have standing to sue to
enforce the license terms.)

(Right now, nobody EXCEPT the FSF has the right to sue somebody to enforce the
license terms on something like gcc. Do you find that a comforting thought?)

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