Re: GPLv3 Position Statement

[Sergey Panov <sipan@sipan.org>]

On Wed, 2006-09-27 at 07:55 +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote: 
> >Fuzzy (but realistic) logic:
> >
> >   kernel != operating_system
> >
> >   operating_system > kernel
> >
> >   operating_system - kernel = 0
> >
> >   kernel - (operating_system - kernel) < 0
> >
> >Another (license compatibility) Q. is:
> >    If the (operating_system - kernel) is re-licensed under v.3 and
> >    the kernel is still under v.2 , would it be possible to distribute
> >    combination (kernel + (operating_system - kernel)) ?
> 
> If by operating system you mean the surrounding userland application,

almost, surrounding_userland_applications = (operating_system - kernel) 

> then yes, why should there be a problem with a GPL2 kernel and a GPL3 
> userland? After all, the userland is not only GPL, but also BSD and 
> other stuff.

It was not a problem with GPL[0-1]/BSD/MIT license, but is it still true
with GPL3? What is the difference between running application on the top
of the kernel "A" and linked with the library "B"?

> >The last Q. is how good is the almost forgotten Hurd kernel?
> 
> Wild guess: At most on par with Minix.

... ???. I am not so sure. Kernel is really a small thing. The VMWare
proprietary hyper-visor was/is reusing Linux drivers with ease, why BSD or
Hurd can not do the same? As a former (Linux) driver writer I like to show the
following numbers to my friends:

$ du -s lib kernel  net drivers
980     lib
1728    kernel
16132   net
130872  drivers

and:

$ find ./kernel -type f -exec cat  {} + | wc -l
48312
$ find ./drivers -type f -exec cat  {} + | wc -l
3367849

================================================================

PS. Given that some of the sub-systems (e.g SCSI) in Linux still suck
badly, other OS (not as in Operating Systems but as in Open Source)
alternatives might eventually gain some ground in the enterprise
environment.

 


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