The focus of FSF and Conservancy is on freedoms; obtaining the code, reading the code, building the code, modifying the code, installing the modified code and running the modified code are essential freedoms and if they aren't possible for a person with the necessary skills and resources, then the license and the enforcement of the license are not achieving the goals of the Free Software and Open Source movements.

If anything, I would say that the amount of freedoms intended to be upheld by these licenses is not expansive enough, considering the SaaSS world that we live in now.

Linus isn't much qualified on any other topic that software development. For example what he describes as his "take" on GPL v2 and its purpose is at odds with what the people that actually wrote it have written and even a basic reading of the text.

What he is mistating is he liked the fact that you could for practical purposes ignore much of the idealogy that a) he has never cared for and b) has always clearly underpinned both v2 and v3 of the GPL license.

Pretending otherwise is only not a lie because charitably he doesn't know what he is talking about or isn't expressing himself very well.

If you want a useful opinion on law ask a lawyer not a programmer. Linus is not only unqualified he doesn't know he is unqualified.

Even relaxed "we only care about source release" GPLv2 enforcement is not desirable to Linus and other Linux developers.

And for good reason!

Linus and Greg KH's reasoning for avoiding lawsuits: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/...

The principles used by FSF/Conservancy operate their copyleft compliance efforts under are eminently reasonable and make it clear that lawsuits are a last resort that are only used when the violator is being unreasonable and blatantly violating the licenses.

https://www.fsf.org/licensing/enforcement-principles https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...

Yes it's incredibly difficult for someone to understand something if their salary depends on not understanding it. It's important to note that Linux would likely not exist if PC makers had used the same lockdown methods as used today.

Moreover when GKH and Linus talk about how GPL enforcement has done nothing good, they conveniently leave out the success of WRT enforcement, which caused one of the biggest Linux offshoots, largely based on volunteer work.

Finally, the audacity of saying "let's talk about legal things without lawyers present" is such a typical software engineer thing, just imagine the reaction someone was proposing to talk about kernel programming without any kernel programmers present

BSD as in the software distribution almost didn't get to exist thanks to a lawsuit, but once that was cleared it was out. It Linux didn't exist, it would have taken over the niche.

Linux itself is not that special - it mostly is a case of right place and right time.