Alan Cox, long time developer for the Linux kernel, spoke to ZDNet about the GPL version 3 draft. It appears that Cox, who probably owns the copyright on the most files, after Linus, is actually supportive of the new license. "The majority of it looks very sensible, such as letting copyright information be displayed in an About box rather than relying on command line instructions (as is the case in GPL 2). Some of the more contentious stuff has sensibly been made optional."

His opinion is in contradiction to that of Linus Torvalds, who said that even if the kernel could be easily re-licensed under the GPL 3, he wouldn't do it. As usual, the pair seem to hold opposing viewpoints, but work toward the same goal. The situation is understandable because, although they're both deeply part of the free-software/open-source community, Linus has expressed numerous times his dissatisfaction of having to deal with Stallman, the Free Software Foundation and their extremely militant philosophies.

A problem with version 2 is that it is explicitly written so that nothing else than a GPLv2 license can be compatible with it. "One of the other nice things is the work to make the GPL compatible with other licenses. That's really important; it will allow people to share more code," Cox added.

Alan Cox did not comment on whether he intends to license his code under the new license or not. If Linus doesn't change his mind, Alan wouldn't either because that has the potential of creating a huge split in the kernel community, and neither has been known to willingly hurt Linux.