I am afraid that large, proprietary companies with intrest in the
Linux market will lead to the death of GNU/Linux.
IBM would have a hard time changing licensing, for the Linux kernel at
least.
They'd need to get permission from every single person who has ever
contributed a significant (for copyright purposes) piece of code to
the kernel before the license could be changed. No single entity can
change the licensing of the kernel on his own, not Linus, not me, not
Alan, not any company, no one.
IBM is just a big machine which has had it's primary gears turning by
the "patent game". They'll have to come to terms with the fact that
in at least some areas of software, it just isn't going to be as
feasible to keep doing so as it used to be. I was actually expecting
events like this to happen when organizations who traditionally had
massive amounts of software intellectual property want to start
contributing to free software.
Later,
David S. Miller
davem@dm.cobaltmicro.com
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