News.com has done an interview with Linus Torvalds in which he is said to be pleased with the new GPL version 3 draft. Keeping Linus happy is a good thing since he controls the largest and most important Free/Open Source software project around: the Linux kernel.
Having read the interview it looks more like he is saying ‘it’s not as bad as previous drafts’: hardly the same thing.
Geeklawyer confesses to being schizophrenic about the Free Software Forum: he passionately loathes Richard ‘St. John the Baptist’ Stallman whom he has met several times and has found vile arrogant antisocial and unpleasant on each occasion. He also loathes all the Free software fundamentalist loonies, such as the amateur lawyers found on the Debian Legal email list.
Equally Open Source fans seem to be a collection of principal free pragmatists who don’t understand, or perhaps really care, why Free principals matter. But Free principles matter as a pragmatic issue as well as a moral one!
My own view was always that the anti-software patents and anti-DRM clauses were a good thing. In some respects this clashes with the idea that a software licence should relate only to matters of software and Torvalds alludes to this in the interview. As a policy it also clashes with the ‘we don’t care who you are or what you do with it’ of GPL2. This clause says that even if you are Microsoft Stalin or the CIA we don’t care we take a politics free stance. The distinction of course is that the CIA and Stalin doesn’t/didn’t attack the users of the GPL. Nonetheless while despising Stallman he supports his position.
Nonetheless Torvalds as the arch advocate of pragmatism needs to be kept as happy as principle will allow. Having the kernel under GPL2 will lead to licensing schism and only proprietary software will benefit from that.
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