[Discuss] licensing: who freakin cares?

[Rich Pieri]

On 4/10/2016 2:55 PM, Robert Krawitz wrote:
> That's a project management/governance issue independent of choice of
> license model.

Imposing quality controls on contributions to a GPL-protected work adds
restrictions to how recipients distribute modifications to that work.
This is expressly prohibited by the GPL. Absurd as it sounds, the GPL's
terms really do prevent RMS from imposing discipline on his volunteer
coders because they themselves are recipients of free (as in FSF)
software. So yes, the GCC governance issues actually do derive from the
license.


> But the Linux kernel is also GPL-licensed, and it doesn't suffer from
> those problems.

That's because Linus Torvalds rejects RMS's philosophy. He imposes
discipline and quality controls on contributions to the kernel despite
this being a technical violation of the GPL's terms.

-- 
Rich P.