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Open Source Used In Cisco DFSI Gateway 4.9(2)
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than most, even apart from the fact that I still am the largest single
copyright holder, if only because of appearances)
- I don't really care about copyright law itself. What I care about is my
own morals. Whether I'd ever sue somebody or not (and quite frankly,
it's the last thing I ever want to do - if I never end up talking to
lawyers in a professional context, I'll be perfectly happy. No
disrespect intended) will be entirely up to whether I consider what
people do to me "moral" or not. Which is why intent matters to me a
lot - both the intent of the person/corporation doign the infringement,
_and_ the intent of me and others in issues like the module export
interface.
Another way of putting this: I don't care about "legal loopholes" and
word-wrangling.
- Finally: I don't trust the FSF. I like the GPL a lot - although not
necessarily as a legal piece of paper, but more as an intent. Which
explains why, if you've looked at the Linux COPYING file, you may have
noticed the explicit comment about "only _this_ particular version of
the GPL covers the kernel by default".
That's because I agree with the GPL as-is, but I do not agree with the
FSF on many other matters. I don't like software patents much, for
example, but I do not want the code I write to be used as a weapon
against companies that have them. The FSF has long been discussing and
is drafting the "next generation" GPL, and they generally suggest that
people using the GPL should say "v2 or at your choice any later
version".
Linux doesn't do that. The Linux kernel is v2 ONLY, apart from a few
files where the author put in the FSF extension (and see above about
copyright assignments why I would never remove such an extension).
The "v2 only" issue might change some day, but only after all documented
copyright holders agree on it, and only after we've seen what the FSF
suggests. From what I've seen so far from the FSF drafts, we're not likely
to change our v2-only stance, but there might of course be legal reasons
why we'd have to do something like it (ie somebody challenging the GPLv2
in court, and part of it to be found unenforceable or similar would
obviously mean that we'd have to reconsider the license).
Linus
PS. Historically, binary-only modules have not worked well under Linux,
quite regardless of any copyright issues. The kernel just develops too
quickly for binary modules to work well, and nobody really supports them.
Companies like Red Hat etc tend to refuse to have anything to do with