Linux Torvalds and many other respected people in the community are hung up over the DRM provisions of GPL v3 draft. The rest is fine with them. In the meantime, Moglen and others are trying to add some even more cast iron features to the license that make the clear violation in spirit, and probable violation in letter of GPL v2 like the Novell deal impossible.
I think that these additional features are definitely more important in their immediacy than the DRM issue - where there are some good arguments for Linus' stance. I think that Stallman and Moglen should be persuaded to delay the DRM related stuff to GPL v4 and instead add the traitor killer stuff to GPL v3, get the community united on it and get it out of the door. I have no doubt that a fair trial will expose Novell's position on their deal's alleged non-violation of GPL v2 to be a lie, but these legal proceedings can take years, years that will allow Novell to survive as a Linux vendor and steal code from developers. I think Novell should be struck totally and immediately. They say they will fork anything that goes under GPL v3. Oh yeah, fork the kernel, fork the toolchain gcc, libs, emacs, and the small matter of about half a million open source pieces of code, etc. Go ahead - make my day. Even the combined manpower of Novell, Microsoft, IBM, etc. could not possibly take that on. Two years from now, when we are all running Linux kernel 2.8.x, with gcc 5.5 or so, Novell will still be peddling Linux kernel 2.6.22 with gcc 4.1 with outdated apps promising its increasingly dubious customers that its products are still this century, while fighting a losing court case trying to to defend its violation of GPL v2. Novell has made its bed. Its laid down with the snake. Its common courtesy for us to supply the covers and switch off the light. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
