Linus Torvalds still sticking with GPL 2
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Linux creator Linus Torvalds, in an interview being made public by the Linux Foundation Tuesday, stressed that version 2 of the GPL (GNU General Public License) still makes the most sense for the Linux kernel over the newer GPL version 3.GPL 3, which was released last year by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), reflects the FSF''s goals while GPL 2 closely matches what Torvalds thinks a license should do, Torvalds said.?"I want to pick the license that makes the most sense for what I want to do. And at this point in time, Version 2 matches what I think we want to do much, much better than Version 3," said Torvalds, who is now a fellow at the foundation. He was interviewed in late-October by Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin.Among GPL 3 highlights are protections against patent infringement lawsuits and provisions for license compatibility. Torvalds acknowledged he had spoken out against GPL 3 before it was released. He had opposed digital rights management provisions in early-2006, calling them burdensome.There could be a change in his stance, though, Torvalds said. GPL 2 basically has acted as a single license covering a huge bulk of source code. Version 3 splits this base with some projects covered by version 2 and others by version 3 or later, he said. Version 3 might be useful if "there ends up being tons of external code that we feel is really important and worthwhile that is under the version 3 license," said Torvalds.He added he cannot change the license on his own anymore. "I mean, because I have accepted code over the last 15 years by people who kind of accepted my original choice of the GPL Version 2, I?m not just, I think, ethically bound by those people?s choices, I am also actually legally bound," Torvalds said.Torvalds also was asked about the Linux development process being centered in North America and Europe despite Linux's now-global reach. Developers, Torvalds said, tend to come from countries with a high density of Internet access. While China and India have a lot of people, they have issues with Internet access, he said.Language and cultural barriers also present an issue. While some Asian countries have huge Internet use and a great deal of education, they do not contribute a lot to the kernel or other open-source projects, said Torvalds. South Americans, meanwhile, may not necessarily speak English but culturally, they are closer to Europe and the U.S., which makes it easier to enter the fray, according to Torvalds.?Asked why the kernel does not have a stable device driver ABI, Torvalds said one reason is that people ask for one but do not want to merge their source code into the stable kernel or the standard kernel."And that, in turn, means that all the people who actually do all the kernel work and maintain the kernel are basically unable to work with that piece of hardware and that vendor because if there are any bugs whatsoever, we can?t fix them," said Torvalds.Commercial vendors have moved away from wanting anything to do with binary drivers because they are not maintainable, he said.Torvalds said Linux started out as a hobby of his, but he has now been working on it full-time for the last four years.
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Microsoft has made its position crystal clear regarding the new version of the GPL, saying that none of its actions are to be misinterpreted as &quot;accepting status as a contracting party of GPLv3 or assuming any legal obligations under such license.&quot;
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The ostensible confusion within Sun over the relationship between its first-born Solaris and sibling-rival Linux won&#39;t be cleared up by the open source license it submitted to the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
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Under the Free Software Foundation's previous roadmap, a so-called "last call" draft of the third GPL revision was due by now, with final release set for March. However, recent comments in the tech press indicate that is no longer the case.
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Ziff Davis - Efforts under way to revise the popular GNU General Public License could put additional pressure on Microsoft by the time it tries to push its long-awaited Windows upgrades out the door.
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Between the lines The Free Software Foundation (FSF) appears to be polishing up its legal sabers over possible violations of the General Public License (GPL) by Microsoft.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - What's the link between eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, often regarded as the father of modern economics, and the open-source software movement? According to Marten Mickos, the chief executive officer of open-source database company MySQL, it's Smith's concept of an "invisible hand," which guides individuals pursuing their own betterment to achieve goals that also benefit society at large. Mickos sees an invisible hand at work in much of what's going on in today's open-source community. This includes the wrangling over the current draft of the GNU general public license version 3 (GPLv3), which he anticipates will result in a good outcome. MySQL's database is distributed under the GPL. Even Oracle's surpriseÂ acquisition of InnobaseÂ a year ago has worked out well, Mickos contends. Oracle's purchase was widely seen as a predatory strike against MySQL, which bundles the Finnish startup's InnoDB database storage engine with its database. The move led to other firms approaching MySQL about developing their own engines for the database and ended up with the company opening up its database storage API (application programming interface) to third parties to give users more choice of which engines to use. Mickos also talked about other aspects of the open-source business model and what lies ahead for MySQL when he chatted Friday with the IDG News Service. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation. IDGNS: Recently, a number of open-source developers have expressed their unhappiness with the Free Software FoundationÂ (FSF) and the second draft of GPLv3. Are you concerned about a potential forking of the license as some people stick with GPLv2 and others move to GPLv3? Mickos: It's not a catastrophe if we have two GPLs out there. It does show how sometimes success can turn against you. The fact that GPLv2 has been so successful means developers don't see a need to change. They say, 'If it's not broke, don't fix it.' I agree with the arguments the FSF has with the license. They've done their homework and they have good rational reasons for changing it. But they also have a philosophical, dogmatic attitude that many open-source developers don't have. We've always preached that open source is not a religion or a political party or a society. FSF does have a societal aspect. That's a great area but some developers don't care. They're not here to save mankind or save the planet from destruction. The process is still ongoing. It's time to debate, not time to deliver conclusions. At MySQL, we haven't made up our minds on GPL and we don't need to do so yet, it's not time. IDGNS: How do you decide when MySQL needs to develop new features for the database and when to rely on the open-source community for those innovations? Mickos: One of the essences of our business is to know when to do what. You need to figure out what the end user wants. We have 10 million users. How the heck do you figure out what they want and then figure out how to do it? If 9 million want one thing and 1 million another, it could be that the 1 million is more important than the 9 million. It's the ability to know what makes sense. Thanks to the early releases [of our products], we can fix mistakes. We're allowed to make mistakes in passing. For example, we had an internal project on optimization or a cache that we were developing, then we found someone else was developing one too. We could turn [around] our mistake and choose what was best. Or, take our JDBC (Java database connectivity) driver. The community developed three, four or five. One was clearly the market leader. We acquired and licensed it and brought the developer onboard. We didn't decide, but let the ecosystem or Darwinism say what works best. IDGNS: So, is open source then a more forgiving environment than the proprietary software world? Mickos: No, you're not forgiven, but open source is self-healing. There's no forgiveness, but someone else can cover up for you. A year ago, Oracle bought InnoDB. Now, a year later, there are many ways you can store MySQL and many players. It's like the invisible hand that Adam Smith spoke about is really working. There's some sort of invisible hand guiding open source. At the end of the day, something good can come out of it. Some people are very angry with FSF, still people will see a community and a good outcome [with GPLv3]. IDGNS: What's ahead in 2007 for MySQL? Mickos: We'll see a strong uptake in the enterprise market as the number of users running MySQL 5.0 grows. It takes time for developers to adopt the new version; it's starting to happen. We'll seeÂ more partners. We already have Novell, Hewlett-Packard, Unisys, and recently Red Hat. There will be others. With our technologies, there will be Falcon and MySQL 5.1. We're doing great work on our GUI (graphical user interface) tools and making our ODBC (open database connectivity) and JDBC drivers even better. IDGNS: What's the latest news on Falcon, the transactional database engine being developed by database architect Jim Starkey who joined MySQL in February? Mickos: It's not just Jim Starkey. We have a handful of engineers working closely with him. The next stage is for Falcon to be in alpha [testing], which will be soon. IDGNS: Is MySQL's current dominance of the open-source database market ever a cause for concern? Mickos: I do hear sometimes from staff, "We're great. We don't need to work." But then our engineers are very self-deprecating and they get embarrassed about any problems. It's a balancing act. Sometimes, I have to say to the organization, "Cheer up, we have a great product;" other times, "Don't be complaisant. We're not done yet." If we're good, we keep going at it until we feel we're done and can rest. If something bad happens, we should work a little bit harder to get it done. Like it looked bad when Oracle acquired InnoDB. At first it was "What the heck are we going to do?" But weÂ turned it to our advantage.
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Sun is reaching out to Linux, and specially Linus Torvalds, in an effort to explain its motives in placing Solaris under GPLv3, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Wednesday.
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Trust and connections among those in the open-source community are key to the process, Linux creator Linus Torvalds says.
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The worlds of Open Source and proprietary software have collided once more with the news that Debian - builder of a version of the GNU/Linux operating system - announcing it cannot live with the terms of Microsoft&#39;s licence for its technology in the
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InfoWorld - A controversial update to the GNU GPL (General Public License) is set to be released Friday by the Free Software Foundation, a representative of the organization said on Tuesday.
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Boomshakalaka A General Public License (GPL) test case in the US looks dead in the water after a start-up promised to abide by the GPLv2 rather than duke it out in court with the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).â¦
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Microsoft has revealed that its patent deal with Linspire doesn&#39;t cover the new version of the GNU General Public License (GPL), the company&#39;s latest effort to distance itself from the GPLv3.
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Blog: Is version 3 of the GNU General Public License asking for too much?
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(InfoWorld) - A day after Linux creator Linus Torvalds publicly questioned the authenticity of Sun's interest in serving the open-source community, Sun CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz invited Torvalds for a sit-down over dinner to discuss how Sun and the overseers of the Linux kernel can join forces. "I wanted you to hear this from me directly," Schwartz wrote in an entry on his blog. "We want to work together, we want to join hands and communities -- we have no intention of holding anything back or pulling patent nonsense. And to prove the sincerity of the offer, I invite you to my house for dinner." Schwartz was defending Sun against comments Torvalds made in a post Tuesday on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Torvalds suggested that Sun is keeping some of the more interesting features of its OpenSolaris open-source project -- such as ZFS, a file system in Sun's OpenSolaris Unix OS that is generating a lot of buzz -- close to the vest because the company doesn't want to help Linux, which has hurt Sun's position in the market. Schwartz begged to differ that Sun is punishing the Linux community for how commodity servers running the OS trumped Sun's Solaris-based hardware after the dot-com bust, a phenomenon that eventually led Sun to release Solaris as an open-source project. "Did the Linux community hurt Sun? No, not a bit. It was the companies that leveraged their work," Schwartz wrote. "I draw a very sharp distinction -- even if our competition is conveniently reckless. They like to paint the battle as Sun vs. the community, and it's not. Companies compete, communities simply fracture." Torvalds also took issue with the fact that Sun has not released OpenSolaris under the GNU GPLv2 (General Public License Version 2), which currently governs Linux. The license for OpenSolaris is the Community Development and Distribution License, which Sun created based on the Mozilla Public License. However, Schwartz is leaning toward supporting GPLv3 (GPLÂ Version 3), which should be released in its final version in the next few weeks as an option for OpenSolaris and other Sun open-source projects before GPLv2, which Torvalds prefers. In fact, the differences between GPLv2 and v3 have caused a public rift between Torvalds and other key members of the open-source community. "We love where the FSF's GPL3 is headed," Schwartz wrote. He cited a "variety of mechanical reasons" why it would be difficult to license OpenSolaris under GPLv2 and insisted it has "nothing to do with being afraid of the community. "Why does open sourcing take so long? Because we're starting from products that exist, in which a diversity of contributors and licensors/licensees have rights we have to negotiate," Schwartz wrote. "Indulge me when I say it's different than starting from scratch. I would love to go faster, and we are all doing everything under our control to accelerate progress.... It's also a delicate dance to manage this transition while growing a corporation." Torvalds in his post seemed unlikely to buy such an argument. "To Sun, a GPLv3-only release would actually let them look good, and still keep Linux from taking their interesting parts, and would allow them to take at least parts of Linux without giving anything back (ahh, the joys of license fragmentation)," he wrote. As to whether Torvalds would accept Schwartz's offer, he joked in an e-mail Wednesday that while he does not get to the San Francisco Bay area very often, "free food is a big draw." Torvalds lives in Portland, Oregon. He also said that though his post was not strictly meant for Schwartz, he appreciates the executive's response, especially his assertion that Sun would not seek patent fees for ZFS, as some in the Linux community wanted to port the file system to Linux. Still, Torvalds' mistrust of Sun's motives in the open-source industry is deep-rooted, though he remains optimistic that Sun and the Linux community still can come together on common interests. "I'll just have to say that I still have the old Java licensing mess fresh in my memory, and I'll take a 'wait and see' attitude to what actually comes out of Sun," he wrote, saying he is the kind of person who "would rather be pleasantly surprised by people's (and companies') actions, than expect too much and be disappointed." Robert McMillan in San Francisco contributed to this report.
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(InfoWorld) - Monsoon Multimedia and the Software Freedom Law Center are discussing a settlement regarding Monsoon's open-source licensing violation, but a deal isn't certain. "Simply coming into compliance now is not sufficient to settle the matter because that would mean anyone can violate the license until caught because the only punishment would be to come into compliance," said Dan Ravicher, SFLC's legal director, in a statement. He confirmed that the parties are in settlement discussions but said an agreement hasn't yet been reached. In a statement, Monsoon said that it has always intended to comply with the licensing requirements and expects to do so within the next couple of weeks. Last week,Â the SFLC filed a lawsuit against Monsoon on behalf of two of the creators of BusyBox, a lightweight set of Unix utilities used in embedded systems. BusyBox claims that even after repeated requests, Monsoon failed to publish its source code. Monsoon uses BusyBox under the GNU General Public License version 2, which requires distributors of software that uses the licensed software to make their source code available. Failing to do so is considered copyright infringement. The SFLC said this is the first case they know of filed in the U.S. to enforce an open-source license. It is being closely watched as a test of the legal strength of GPL2. If the case goes to trial, the key decision will be whether the court decides that GPL2 is a license or a contract, said James Gatto, a lawyer who leads the open-source team at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, which is based in New York and is not involved in the lawsuit. If the court decides GPL2 is a contract, it would be a blow to the open-source community. That's because the remedy for breach of contract is damages for losses, he said. "Here, what's the loss to a plaintiff that doesn't charge for the software?" he said. The court can also in some cases require specific actions in a breach of contract case, he said. In a licensing arrangement, the defendant would be charged with copyright infringement, entitling the plaintiff to damages and an injunction. It is unusual for an open-source licensing issue to reach the courts. Typically, the parties work it out privately. "There's not enough at stake generally for people not to comply," Gatto said. In Europe, the GPL Violations Project has brought at least one open-source licensing case to court.
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Ziff Davis - It's been 14 years since major changes have been made to the GNU General Public License, and there is a need for a new version; however, there will be significant challenges, claims FSF's Eben Moglen.