14 DAY TRIAL // The founder and leader of Linux, Linus Torvalds, made some harsh comments on the committees organized by the Free Software Foundation to help draft version 3 of the GNU Public License. However, as far as NewsForge can determine, none of those actually involved in the process agree to Torvalds' assessment that the Free Software Foundation isn't listening to feedback.
Immediately after the second draft of the GPLv3 was released, Linus Torvalds was quoted in a story by Stephen Shankland as saying: "The FSF doesn't even seem interested in any feedback. They set up several 'committees' to get comments from various industry players, and everything I've heard about the process is that they then ignored them all and did what they wanted anyway."
When Newsforge asked for confirmation on the quote, Torvalds responded: "It's pretty accurate. I'm not at all happy with the way the GPLv3 thing has gone, and to me it looks very much like RMS [Richard M. Stallman] knew what he wanted when he started, and the discussion has been mostly about just the details in how to explain it. I'm sure the discussions have clarified (and hopefully thus improved) the license, but the end result seems to simply be inferior to the GPLv2, at least as far as I can tell."
Even if Free Software Foundation sometimes shows a streak of authoritarian rigidity, it should not be condemned in this case, when it is genuinely consulting the community. Torvalds' comments are both unfair and unsubstantiated.
Please read the full article by Bruce Byfield, here.