Messages in this thread | | | From | (Andrew Pimlott) | Date | Thu, 21 Jun 2001 15:51:03 -0400 | Subject | Re: Controversy over dynamic linking -- how to end the panic |
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On Thu, Jun 21, 2001 at 03:17:16PM -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > IANAL, but I believe that Linus's position as anthology copyright holder > makes him privileged in this respect.
Regardless of what you find in the books, recall that Linus has stated that decentralizing the copyright of Linux was a goal, so you may not find him willing to claim an "anthology copyright" (if such a thing even applies to the kernel, which in my NAL opinion, it does not).
From http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/linus1998.shtml:
Torvalds: And when somebody sends me big patches, I don't ask them to assign the copyright over to me. So right now for example, the kernel itself has probably on the order of 50 or 100 copyright holders and the actual copyright license has always been the same. It's the GPL that requires that sources always be available. So in order to make a version of Linux that is not under that license, you have to get all those copyright holders to agree to the new license. The parts of the kernel that I own completely are significant, but they aren't enough to really make a good system. I did that consciously. I wanted to bind my own hands so that even if people don't trust me personally, they trust the fact that even if I wanted to turn commercial, I couldn't.
Andrew (Feeling stupid for quoting Linus and Cc:ing Linus.) - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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