GPLv2 or GPLv3 ?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 02:55:34PM +0200, Christopher Friedt wrote:
> I think it's fairly obvious that M$ is afraid of losing out bigtime, 
> after the 'obviousness' thing. They've seen how FOSS has now become 
> extremely widespread. The bottom line is that they need to continue to 
> 'lie, cheat and steal', in order to continue ensure their financial 
> dominance.
> 
> That's why they are approaching FOSS vendors with protection agreements 
> a la Novell, etc.
> 
> One thing that I'm not really clear on, and maybe some of you can 
> comment, is how moving GNU tools to GPLv3 will affect Linux.

It won't.  Moving glibc to gplv3 might affect distributions.  Of course
the latest draft of gplv3 seems to be much more widely supported after
they changed some of the very very controversial bits.  Linus even said
that the latest draft actually looked like something he would be willing
to use, since it actualyl seems to fit the spirit of the gpl v2 which
was something earlier drafts in some ways failed to do.

> Has Linus mentioned anything about moving to the GPLv3 ?

Well for the first drafts he was totally against it.  That and of course
the being imposible because it is licensed as gpl v2 only in most
places, and the previously mentioned problem of getting every copyright
owner to agree (Linus specifically chose not to want copyrights assigned
to him unlike the FSF, because he wouldn't want to trust anyone else
with deciding what was right, so he wouldn't expect others to trust him
either, or something along those lines.)

> If not, will developers using the kernels be limited to using GPLv2 tools ?

Of course not.  BSD uses lots of GPL tools which is fine.  Any code
added to the kernel has to have a GPL v2 compatible license of course
since the kernel as a whole is gpl v2, although some parts are dual
license BSD/GPL and some are GPL v2 or later, but everything is at least
GPL v2 licensed.  The tools you use don't matter.  You can compile the
kernel with intel's commercial compiler for linux if you want, since it
has much better optimization than gcc apparently and that doesn't affect
anything.

--
Len Sorensen
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