[copyleft-next] anti-lock down non-negotiable-ness (was Re: [MERGE REQUEST] reinstate dl-supp)

Theodore Ts'o tytso at mit.edu
Tue Dec 4 19:43:59 UTC 2012


On Tue, Dec 04, 2012 at 02:09:26PM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote:
> On 12/04/2012 10:35 AM, Richard Fontana wrote:
> > Linus Torvalds may have said something publicly about this during that
> > time period as well (that is, about use of 'additional permissions'
> > being unsatisfactory for those who might otherwise be able to live
> > with GPLv3 but objected to the anti-lockdown requirement). 
> 
> Much later on he did:
> http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0706.1/2700.html
> 
> So I might be remembering that, or perhaps he said something to the
> same effect several months earlier.

In addition the reasoning he gave (which is that someone could take
code that you wrote, and strip off the additional permissions), which
you might be morally against, one of the other objections to this
approach is that for an issue such as anti-lockdown, which has many
passionate supporters (including Bradley, Alaxandre Oliver, et. al),
this would essentially encourage forks, which would be rather
disastrous from a community point of view --- i.e., we could easily
end up with a FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD/DragonflyBSD situation, without
the ability to be able to share code between the various BSD forks in
a bilateral way.

Regards,

						- Ted


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