Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by palata 143 days ago
Is he pro-tivoization, or is he not against it?

I heard him talk about GPLv3 someday, and what he said was that it was a mistake to call it "GPLv3", as if it was the evolution of GPLv2, because for him it should have been a totally different licence.

Which I find fair: there are different kinds of copyleft (like MPL vs GPL), it makes sense to say that GPLv2 is a different concept than GPLv3. Whereas I don't know if anyone should use GPLv1 because GPLv2 sounds like it fixed GPLv1 without changing its spirit.

1 comments

GPLv2 was clearly intended to let you change the software on your devices. In some countries, GPLv2 already prohibits tivoization.

However, big tech found an exploit: In some countries, GPLv2 allows tivoization. This was not intended by the authors of the GPLv2. There was another exploit involving patent licenses, and a reverse exploit about license termination that allowed some developers to extort some users. They fixed these and made it the GPLv3. It's a bugfix release, not anything new. You only don't like it if you relied on the bugs.

Well, that's not really mutually exclusive with what I said. Those who called it GPLv3 consider it's a bugfix, those who decided to stay on GPLv2 consider it's a new licence.