Torvolds on GPLv3

[Michael Cohen]

On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 09:48:53AM +0930, Janet Hawtin wrote:
> I like Linus but I like Freedom and FOSS.
> DMCA has changed the rules whether we like it or not.

Linus has been wrong before (bk anyone?) and usually something catastrophic
needs to happen to make him change his mind. When the Bit Keeper issue raised
its head there were plenty of people who said told you so. Then, just like now,
principles mattered more than pragmatism.

Binary blobs are a way to avoid the GPL altogether. I guess that Linus figures
that its not a threat because binary blobs are really high maintanance. For
example the NVidia drivers keep breaking with every new kernel, and require
lots of maintainance to keep up to date. The ATI drivers are hopeless and
really fiddly to install - hence most people dont use ATI and prefer nvidia.
That said, intel chips have open source drivers and provide reasonabel 3d
performance. Therefore intel chipsets are nicer to have in a laptop. (less
maintainance).

Sure they do violate GPL, but pragmatically they are allowed to do so because
without that linux would lose a lot of market share.

If/when people start to use binary blobs as a way to bypass the GPL we might
find ourselves in a slighly different position. For example imagine a machine
which will only run signed kernels (not far fetched with trusted computing).
Probably it would be a total commercial failure but with enough marketing it
could happen.

Michael.