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   Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦 (osma@mas.to)'s status on Monday, 29-Dec-2025 22:46:13 JST Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦

   • Philip

   - GPLv2 not covering the hardware may have been an oversight
   - GPLv3 specifically addressing that indicates the intent to cover that
   - Linux continuing to use GPLv2 is not an oversight but an explicit signal that the kernel developers do not intend to make claims over hardware access
   @ghul @pkal

   • Embed this notice
     The Penguin of Evil (etchedpixels@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 29-Dec-2025 22:46:09 JST The Penguin of Evil

     in reply to

     • Rob Landley
     • Wilfried Klaebe
     • Philip

     @landley @wonka @osma @ghul @pkal That's fine 2.0.39 is still the best Linux kernel 😁

     James Morris likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     The Penguin of Evil (etchedpixels@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 29-Dec-2025 22:46:10 JST The Penguin of Evil

     in reply to

     • Wilfried Klaebe
     • Philip

     @wonka @osma @ghul @pkal GPLv2 explicitly allows any later version, and removing that is an additional restriction so dubious. It would take a court to sort that question out however, and for Linux it's not likely to ever happen.

     More importantly though was also the social contract. Linux was built and people contributed on the GPLv2 basis. Changing that would have been shutting doors on existing contributors. That point to me was the salient one Linus made when GPL3 arrived

   • Embed this notice
     Rob Landley (landley@mstdn.jp)'s status on Monday, 29-Dec-2025 22:46:10 JST Rob Landley

     in reply to

     • Wilfried Klaebe
     • The Penguin of Evil
     • Philip

     @etchedpixels @wonka @osma @ghul @pkal "At your option."

     Each new derived work adds a separate layer of copyright, and you need compatible licenses to each copyrights in order to distribute the resulting work. If ANY of those copyright holders explicitly declines the "or later" option, the only license the work may be distributed under is the "fails closed" subset.

     Linus explicitly declined "or later" option for his copyrights in september 2000, long before v3 existed.

     https://web.archive.org/web/20021223110351/http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0009.1/0096.html

   • Embed this notice
     Wilfried Klaebe (wonka@chaos.social)'s status on Monday, 29-Dec-2025 22:46:13 JST Wilfried Klaebe

     in reply to

     • Philip

     Re your third point: Linux could not trivially switch to GPLv3 even if kernel developers intended to do so because everyone involved would need to agree and some authors cannot agree anymore on account of being dead. Their contributions would need to be replaced first.

     @osma @ghul @pkal