Overhaul of Linux License Could Have Broad Impact

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 06:20:17PM -0500, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> 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 :-).

Some purists find Stallman to have screwed up licenses lately though
such as the GNU documentation license which Debian has declared non-free
by their standards for example.  They hope to avoid the same kind of
stupid issues with the GPL v3.

Lennart Sorensen
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