Linus Torvalds, creator, leader and general god of Linux kernel development commented today on the possibility that the kernel would be licensed under the new GNU General Public License. The first public draft of version 3 of the GPL, authored by Richard Stallman, was released by the Free Software Foundation on the 15th of January. Since then, it seems like the entire free software and open-source community debated the text and whether the Linux kernel could or should give up the GPL v2 in favor of the new version.

The difficulty stems from the development and licensing model of open-source software. In general, many developers contribute code to a project, while each retains the copyright to their pieces of code. Although many projects restrict the choices to a single license, contributions to the Linux kernel are only required to stick to an open-source license. The result is that the kernel has parts licensed under GPL 2, GPL/BSD, the MIT license. In addition, the standard GNU COPYING file which normally contains the version 2 license contains a note stating that "If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation." This means that even though the kernel is licensed strictly under version 2, parts retain the possibility for other versions.


"The Linux kernel is under the GPL version 2. Not anything else. Some individual files are licensable under v3, but not the kernel in general.
And quite frankly, I don't see that changing. I think it's insane to require people to make their private signing keys available, for example. I wouldn't do it. So I don't think the GPL v3 conversion is going to happen for the kernel, since I personally don't want to convert any of my code." -- Linus Torvalds, on the Linux Kernel mailing list

"Conversion isn't going to happen. Linus"