Free Republic

The new GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 is not a fit for Linux because switching would require permission from the kernel's thousands of de facto owners, a maintainer of the SCSI portion of the kernel said on Thursday. Also, Microsoft released a statement that the company has no GPLv3 obligations. Although the earlier GPLv2 has been used with Linux, GPLv3, released by the Free Software Foundation June 29, presents problems, according to James Bottomley, gatekeeper of the Linux Kernel SCSI Maintainership, which governs disk storage access in the kernel. The Linux kernel is not owned by any one...

BURLINGAME, Calif. - We now know what happens when big hairy software coders work with big hairy lawyers. The result, understandably, is anything but slick. Meet GPLv3, the free software movement's latest legal tool to keep their code from being fenced in. At least its author, Richard Stallman, has pluck. The coder and richly bearded patron saint of free software is launching this wad of legal jargon Friday — with practically every geek on the planet fixated on the retail debut of the iPhone — looking to steal a bit of Apple (nasdaq: AAPL -news - people) Chief Steve Jobs'...

Linus Torvalds, father of the Linux kernel, has fleshed out his unhappiness with GPLv3 in three recent posts on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). Torvalds previously stated that the kernel will remain under the licensing terms of GPLv2. Yesterday, Tovalds offered his opinion as to where the battle over DRM should take place: I would suggest that anybody who wants to fight DRM practices seriously look at the equivalent angle. If you create interesting content, you can forbid that _content_ to ever be encrypted or limited. In other words, I personally think that the anti-DRM clause is much...