------ ..and btw, sorry for being irritable Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, July 29 2006 @ 01:12 AM EDT
I end up being irritable, just because I find the whole GPLv3 discussion extremely frustrating. I'd love to be a lot more constructive in my criticism, but I've gone through all the license discussions over a decade ago (when it was the old "BSD vs GPL" discussion, with some rabid BSD people claiming the GPL wasn't sustainable), and I find myself seeing no actual upsides to the whole GPLv3 process at all - the license isn't getting any better, and it just ends up bringing up all the same old fights that we have actually been very good at avoiding for the last decade. As a result, I just get really really frustrated, and would much rather do something productive instead, but at the same time, I feel that the GPLv2 is worth protecting, even if I also feel that standing up for GPLv2 is really not very interesting or fun. I've done it before, and I'd much rather not have had to do it again. A lot of people seem to think I'm very set against the GPLv3, and maybe my position is more palatable if you think of it as not so much being against GPLv3, but really an ode to how good the GPLv2 has been, and how it has been able to bring people who had very different goals together. So instead of ragging on the deficiencies of the GPLv3, I'd like to make this last post just point out how great the GPLv2 has been, and point out how it really has been able to have literally tens of thousands of people and hundreds of companies stand behind it. Even though all the disagreements over various fundamental other issues, the GPLv2 has actually survived really well. People say it has deficiencies, and hey, I have to say that I've always felt it was unnecessarily wordy (it seems to be a general legal disease), but on the other hand, fifteen years of history ends up not just making it the most well-known software license ever, it's also become almost universally accepted at a lot of companies, and it's been upheld in courts around the world. That's really saying something. Linus ------ regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
