He is making a claim that FSF tried to persuade him that the GPLv3 would satisfy Linus' ideology under the reasoning that it allows him to invalidate the tivoization clause.

Here's a quote from Linus from that video:

"Yes the GPLv3 allows you to say tivoization is not an issue for us. But it allows somebody else to take the project and say, hey, the GPLv3 without tivoization is compatible with the full GPLv3. So I will make my own fork of this and I will start doing drivers that use the full version 3. And where am I stuck then? I'm stuck saying, hey, I gave you the source code and now I can't take it back (your changes). That's completely against the whole point of the license in the first place."

Basically Linus' only requirements-- "use and give back"-- are a subset of the FSF's requirements-- "use, give back and don't lock down." Linus is accusing the FSF of claiming that the GPLv3 could do a fine job supporting Linus' requirements when in reality it doesn't protect his software from gaining additional requirements which he explicitly stated he didn't want added. And what would protect his software from that? The very license that they were persuading him to change-- GPLv2. In other words, he's accusing some unnamed representative(s) of the FSF of lying to suit their own ends.

That's rather hard to believe IMO, as I've never read or heard anything from the FSF that is purposely deceitful in this manner. Additionally, I haven't read statements from Linus that are purposely deceitful, either.

I can only surmise that a tiny amount of doctrinal difference collided with enormous egos to create a pathetic waste of time, energy, and goodwill.

The FSF has claimed that several licenses that have requirements not present in GPLv2 are compatible with GPLv2; the FSF is very aggressive in pushing the use of their license and their bias for such use definitely colors their representation of facts.

Aggressively pushing the GPLv3 and misrepresenting its efficacy to GPLv2 fans are two completely different things.

He has said from the beginning that the choice of GPL for Linux was a technical one that he thinks produces the best code, and that the GPLv3 offered no technical gains and thus wasn't worth switching to. Presumably if he thought switching to a different license altogether produced better code, he'd do that.

Is not having an opinion on software freedom an ideology? I don't have an opinion on most political questions in, say, Mongolia. Does that give me a particular ideology on whatever political spectrum Mongolia has?

> If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.

So Linux could've theoretically upgraded to the GPLv3 (or GPLv2+). However, Linus didn't like that idea, and in 2006 edited the COPYING file to say that it was GPLv2-only. If you really wanted to, you could take the 2006 source code and make a GPLv3 fork of Linux.

You certainly theoretically could, but maintaining, updating, and modernizing such a beast would be out of the reach of most people and organizations. 11 years of progress can't be replicated so quickly, especially when you consider you'd need to do it in a clean-room sort of fashion to be entirely aboveboard, which means many people who are already well familiar with the Linux kernel couldn't even work on it.

At any rate, I think your estimate of the timing is off: I found references to the "GPLv2-only" language in the kernel's COPYING file as far back as linux-2.4.0-test8, which was released sometime in 2000, and I didn't really try to go farther back.