Bored at work, so I was checking out The Register, as I read BOFH regularly. I came across this article. Personally, I've never been a GPL fan. I always thought it was foolish, since, you know, I'm a developer and I happen to like to eat. Don't get me wrong, open source is grand. I love it. I just don't like a license that says, "and if you use me, what you do is open too!" I DO like the BSD-style license, "I'm free, but what you do with me is your own business." If you want to contribute, that's great, it should be encouraged. Encouraged, but not forced.

Looks like Torvalds, the grandmaster of the Linux kernel isn't that far off from me, at least on certain issues. I know why they've got this DRM clause. DRM is something that open sourcers despise. I hate DRM on principle too, but you can't expect to open up everything the way he reads GPL 3 as doing. I'm going to trust him on this, since he obviously knows more about this sort of thing than I do. I agree with his point. Who in their right minds wants all their private keys to be public? Doesn't that start to intimate that we shouldn't have any form of security? I, for one, think that the kernel of the OS needs to support some nice lockdown procedures that aren't easy for the bad folks out there to get ahold of. Considering how much work I've put into securing the servers at work, I can hardly be blamed. Looks like Torvalds is with me on this one.

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