On Monday 12 August 2002 02:46, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-08-11 at 23:56, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >
> > On Sun, 11 Aug 2002, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > >
> > > If somebody sues you, you change the algorithm or you just hire a
> > > hit-man to whack the stupid git.
> >
> > Btw, I'm not a lawyer, and I suspect this may not be legally tenable
> > advice. Whatever. I refuse to bother with the crap.
>
> In which case you might as well do the rest of the world a favour and
> restrict US usage of Linux in the license file while you are at it.
> Unfortunately the USA forces people to deal with this crap. I'd hope SGI
> would be decent enough to explicitly state they will license this stuff
> freely for GPL use (although having shipping Linux themselves the
> question is partly moot as the GPL says they can't impose additional
> restrictions)
I do not agree that it is enough to license it for 'GPL' use. If there is
a license, it should impose no restrictions that the GPL does not. There
is a big distinction. Anything else, and the licensor is sending the message
that they reserve the right to enforce against Linux users.
In other words, a license grant has to cover *all* uses of Linux and not just
GPL uses.
In my opinion, RedHat has set a bad example by stopping short of promising
free use of Ingo's patents for all Linux users. We are entering a difficult
time, and such a wrong-footed move simply makes it more difficult.
-- Daniel - 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/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Aug 15 2002 - 22:00:25 EST