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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