Overhaul of Linux License Could Have Broad Impact

[Evan Leibovitch]

Jason Carson wrote:

>Why are they rewriting the licence, what's wrong with version 2
>  
>
IIRC the main update is about patents and other IP that someone might 
attach to code. The new version is also the first to have been 
thoroughly vetted by multiple lawyer types and is designed to be 
applicable in legal systems that aren't American.

BTW, nobody is forcing anyone to use the new license. You can always 
explicitly state in your code that you are licensing your work under 
Release 2 of the GPL, which will never go away. There's not even any 
guarantee that the Linux kernel will switch to the new version until the 
maintainers explicitly say so.

Ie, the overhaul _could_ have broad impact, then again maybe not. The 
principles and intent of the new GPL are not significantly different 
from the old one; it does, after all, have to please Stallman :-).

- Evan
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml