Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Wed, 3 Feb 1999 10:30:58 -0800 (PST) | | From | Tim Smith <> | | Subject | Re: RMS at it again *sigh* |
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> That man is starting to worry me. If he forces certain critical libraries > such as glibc into the GPL instead of the current LGPL, it spells deep > trouble for all.
It would not be deep trouble--there would simply be a split, with a Linux branch of glibc developing under LGPL. The Linux branch would probably become the dominant one on most platforms. Considering Red Hat's interest in having all the major libraries *not* be GPL'ed, I suspect the interval between any announcement that a future glibc was going to be GPL'ed instead of LGPL'ed, and the announcement that Red Hat has hired some top developers to maintain and extend the LGPL'ed glibc would be about a nanosecond.
Linux is no longer small and poor. There are a lot of developers behind it, and a lot of money. If the developers/maintainers of any major part of Linux start going in a direction incompatible with Linux, they can be replaced. The nature of the free software licenses most of the components are under means that when someone changes their terms for future versions, they can't withdraw the old versions, so it is not like we would have to start from scratch and write a new library, or a new compiler, or a new windowing system, or a new whatever--we'd get to start with whatever version was current at the time of the licensing change.
--Tim Smith
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