On Sun, Mar 09, 2025 at 01:55:46PM +0900, Maxim Cournoyer wrote: > Which many concessions to pragmatism are you referring to? The only one > I can think of is allowing devices to load their non-free firmwares, but > I'm not even sure this was a concession, more of a 'I don't care what > code runs outside of the kernel' position of Linus that I doubt has > changed throughout the years. Perhaps sticking to GPLv2 *only* could be > thought of another concession, as it doesn't defend against Tivoization > the way GPLv3 does.
Yes, I'm referring to choices made about software freedom. As we know from linux-libre, Linux includes many nonfree components. I think this encourages hardware manufacturers to support Linux, because they don't have to make any hard choices about business strategy (open vs closed), and thus easier for hardware users. If Linux didn't do this, I doubt that the Linux foundation would have hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, nor would most Linux contributors be paid professionals. And only using GPL2 is part of that. It's a pragmatic choice in favor of the goals of Linux's leadership team, which are different from GNU's goals. Of course, Linux couldn't feasibly change to GPL3 because their copyright licensing model is like ours: contributors own the copyright to their contributions. There are too many people to ask for permission to make the change.
