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: Infamy or Praise

Strike Two for GPL v.3

By Colin Samuels

Two of the more prominent open source projects around, Google's Android initiative and the ongoing development of the Linux operating system, have officially spurned the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) third-version General Public License(GPL). As mentioned here earlier, Google chose the Apache Software Foundation license over GPL v.3; Linux originator Linus Torvalds has now opted to stay with GPL v.2 rather than move his project to the newer version:

Linux creator Linus Torvalds, in an interview being made public by the Linux Foundation Tuesday, stressed that version 2 of the GPL (GNU General Public License) still makes the most sense for the Linux kernel over the newer GPL version 3.

GPL 3, which was released last year by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), reflects the FSF's goals while GPL 2 closely matches what Torvalds thinks a license should do, Torvalds said.

"I want to pick the license that makes the most sense for what I want to do. And at this point in time, Version 2 matches what I think we want to do much, much better than Version 3," said Torvalds, who is now a fellow at the foundation.

Full post as published by Infamy or Praise on January 10, 2008 (boomark / email).