Re: FreeGPL license proposal (was Re: Linus Speaks About KDE-Bashing)

Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Wed, 15 Jul 1998 20:31:56 +0100 (BST)


> Why not consider making the Mozilla Public License the basis for the
> new FreeGPL license? The one thing about the Mozilla Public License
> is that it has been extensively reviewed and hashed out by both
> Netscapes laywers and developers in the Open Source Community to the
> point of agreement.

FreeGPL is a very poor and misleading name for any new license. I thin
the MPL has its place however

> The one biggest plus is that this license is now well known, and I
> think it is highly beneficial to the Open Source Community for as
> much code as possible to fall under the same license. I think this is

Licenses - each has its place but not too many . Couldnt agree more

> understand all the legal ramifications of the license. In fact IMHO
> if you interpret the GPL/LGPL's anti-commerical sentiments it would
> appear to me that much of the commercial software appearing for Linux
> does violate some of the GPL licensing (but this is argueable because
> the damn license is so vague!).

The C libraries are LGPL so that appears to be a non issue. The kernel
itself is GPL and because of license interpretation issues the kernel
has the following in the README, to clarify it.

-----------

NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel
services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use
of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".

-----------

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.altern.org/andrebalsa/doc/lkml-faq.html