Re: GPLv3 comedy unfolding -- (Linus' "last word") GPLv2 is "been upheld in courts around the world" (and "is worth protecting")

[Alexander Terekhov]

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..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
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regards,
alexander.