Would Linus put up a fight if someone took his source tree and relicensed the whole thing as GPLv3 without his permission? Yep, you betcha he'd fight and he has already had to put up with a lot of strong arm nonsense from the GPLv3/FSF zealots.
----- Forwarded message from Reyk Floeter <reyk@xxxxxxxxxxx> ------ This is eating our time. Every few weeks I get a new discussion about licensing of the atheros driver etc. blah blah. Why can't they just accept the license as it is and focus on more important things?
I will talk to different people to get the latest state and to think about the next steps. I don't even know if the issue has been solved in the linux tree.
To clarify this myth once again:
The patch that mistakenly changed BSD-only code to GPL has never ever been in the Linux tree.
Marc Espie wrote:After reading the current email exchanges, I've become convinced there is something VERY fishy going on, and some people there have hidden agendas. Look at the situation: Reyk Floeter writes some code, puts it under a dual licence, and goes on vacation. While he's away, some other people (Jiri, for starters) tweak the copyright and licence on the file he's mostly written. Without asking
Dude, you have got to put down the conspiracy juice. NOTHING IS IN STONE, because nothing has been committed to my repository, much less torvalds/linux-2.6.git. A patch was posted, people complained, corrections were made. That's how adults handle mistakes. Mistakes were made, and mistakes were rectified.
Reyk. Without even having the basic decency to wait for him to be around.
Demonstrably false: you cannot make that claim until the code is actually committed to Linux.
On Sun, 02 Sep 2007 16:03:07 +0200, Marc Espie said:Look at the situation: Reyk Floeter writes some code, puts it under a dual licence, and goes on vacation. While he's away, some other people (Jiri, for starters) tweak the copyright and licence on the file he's mostly written. Without asking Reyk. Without even having the basic decency to wait for him to be around.
And we collectively told Jiri where to stick that.
So let's recap:
1) Jiri submitted a borked patch that changed the licenses.
2) We didn't accept said patch.
3) There's then a whole big fuss about a *NON EXISTENT PROBLEM*.
I could see where the *BSD people could complain if we had *accepted and distributed* said patch. But it was wrong, we recognized it was wrong, and the system is working as designed. So let's quit the flamefest already.