Should we drop the "or later" after GPLv2?

[Rob Landley]

On Thursday 24 August 2006 5:42 am, Roberto A. Foglietta wrote:
> > Its not just about GPLv3 either, in theory there may be legal reasons
> > why a GPLv4 is desired.
>
>  Sincerly I met RMS some years ago and I have to say that future of
> GPL will not be as much bright as in the past was.

I drove up to boston to interview RMS in 2001, I know the feeling.  However, 
GPLv3 isn't being spearheaded by RMS, but by Eben Moglen, who is sane.  (I 
suspect Stallman has veto power, but he's got a good lawyer trying to talk 
him into accepting at least moderately sane drafts.)

> Expect GPL v4 never 
> will be wrote or it will be a last volunteers document like: "I am RMS
> the person who changed the world and invented the freedom, remember
> me". RMS *was* great, GPL v2 still be great. Past was the time of
> great men/women, present belong to us, future to our children.

Linus is still in charge of Linux after 15 years because he delegates 
religiously, is willing to listen to people he disagrees with, and will 
occasionally step back and admit he was wrong.  (He is _way_ better at all 
three than I am, which I try to keep in mind.)

In fact, these days Linus has largely stepped out of Andrew Morton's way in 
terms of integrating patches and has moved into a pure architect role.  At 
OLS, I spoke to a couple people who were convinced that Linus doesn't 
actually do anything important anymore, and that Andrew Morton is really in 
charge now.

Now THAT is a good leader for a self-organized group of hobbyists.

The point is that RMS' inability to work with people was one of the big 
reasons the HURD project had already stalled by the time Linux launched in 
1991.

Do you know why the FSF originally rose to prominence?  It was their 
MIT-provided FTP site.  What they offered in the 1980's was a high bandwidth 
FTP site back before there NSFNET "Acceptable Use Policy" changed to allow 
for-profit Internet Service Providers to connect to the internet backbone.  
You had to partner with a university, or corporate research facility.  When 
people like Larry Wall signed over the copyright to projects like "patch" 
(that had _nothing_ to do with the FSF), did they do so because of the 
project's ideals, or because that's the only way they could get internet 
hosting for it?

But that all changed.  People who wanted to get their code up after 1990 or so 
could put it on sunsite, or on ftp.cdrom.com, or on a number of sites that 
reduced the athena.ai.mit.edu to outright irrelevance.  Linus didn't have to 
go to the FSF to get Linux up on a website, he got _three_ mirrors in the 
first year.  And that meant nobody had to go to the FSF to get their code 
distributed anymore.

The FSF was the SourceForge of its day, but changes in the net eliminated that 
advantage 15 years ago, and that meant dealing with Stallman was too high a 
price to pay.  And he's never recovered from that.

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.