Buy? Of course! You can buy it now... Just go down to your
friendly computer store and poink down your favorite coins till it piles
up to the price of the RedHat or SuSe or Mandrake or Turbo Linux set you
like. There! You've purchased the kernel, along with a whole lot of
other nifty utilities thrown in for good measure.
Now, if you mean restrict it by purchasing the exclusive rights
to it... 'fraid not, no...
It's GPL... Even if someone were to purchase some sort of
future rights to future revisions from Linus, even Linux can not retract
the versions that are out on the net, under GPL. Nothing prevents the
rest of us from continuing on from the "last GPL" version and leaving
even the great one in the dust. With the loss of the open source
contributions, how far do you think a closed, restricted, kernel would
get? Not very far.
You can't make licensing restriction retroactive or revoke the GPL
on the versions that are already out there. It's a silly question on it's
face. If someone did "buy the kernel" what would they do with it? They
can't stop other people from using what is already out there or making
improvements in it. They would loose most of the current contributors
and maintainers. Where would they go with it. That would be an all-time
record breaker for the most self defeating idea in the history of mankind!
Mike
-- Michael H. Warfield | (770) 985-6132 | mhw@WittsEnd.com (The Mad Wizard) | (770) 331-2437 | http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/ NIC whois: MHW9 | An optimist believes we live in the best of all PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471 | possible worlds. A pessimist is sure of it!
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