Open source guru Alan Cox has voiced his support for the
controversial version 3.0 of the GNU General
Public Licence
in an exclusive podcast interview with Computer
Weekly.
Cox was once regarded as the Linux number two behind
Linus Torvalds because of his work
maintaining the Linux kernel, and he is still a major force in
the open source community. But whereas Torvalds has openly
criticised GPL 3.0, and said he will not be signing up to the
new licence, Cox is fully behind it.
"There are still a couple of problems with the current draft,
but it is getting very close to being a good licence," said
Cox.
Devised by the Free Software Foundation, the licence will govern
how open source code is distributed and what happens if it is
modified. GPL 3.0 states that anyone who has developed open source
software must grant a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent
licence.
Cox highlighted an area in the draft which specifically covers
last year's
Novell/Microsoft agreement. He said it meant
that users of Novell's SuSE Linux could not be sued for patent
infringement should any of the code in SuSE be covered by a
Microsoft patent. GPL 3.0 discourages such indemnification,
describing such agreements as "de facto proprietisation of
software".
Listen to the Alan Cox interview
>>
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