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

David Schwartz
2007-06-14T21:03:52Z

> Oh, come on: you're not serious, right? Something indeed prevents me
> -- the fact that I'm not a hardware manufacturer, I don't have fabs,
> outsource vendors to provide me w/ designs, ASICs, etc. Nor to I have
> the money to pay one-off prices for various components if they're even
> available in batches that small.
>
> This argument seems totally disingenuous to me. The GPLv<3 was written
> in a time when the majority of sotware to which the license was
> applied was written for general purpose computers. The "user" was the
> owner of the computer, and Freedom 0 was about letting that user RUN
> modified copies of the software.

And what about people who can't modify the Linux kernel? They don't know C.
They don't know how to use a shell. They're not familiar with UNIX operating
systems at all. Maybe they aren't smart enough to modify kernel code.

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.

I certainly understood the GPL as ensuring the right to get the source code
so that you could do something else with it. I never understood the GPL to
be about getting hardware to do something else just because it ran GPL'd
software.

DS