The AGPL licenses are explicitly compatible with the GPL ones. FWIW, this issue is essentially entirely caused by Linus, who refuses to use or accept GPL3.
> FWIW, this issue is essentially entirely caused by Linus, who refuses to use or accept GPL3. That's a bit disingenuous. Linus has said no to the GPLv3, yes, but his reasons for doing so have merit.
The very fact that the GPL v3 is incompatible with v2 indicates that v2 has something the v3 takes away, no matter how well-meaning that was.
FINALLY AN ACTUAL ANSWER!! :D I had done a bunch of research into this a while ago and filed an issue with the Ubuntu bug tracker, but was told it was due to ABI stability (which did not make any sense). https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1894407 Understanding that there is actually an underlying license problem is like finally being told all of the reasons for everything that happened on LOST ;P.
So `perf` is super slow on Ubuntu as well?
I feel for distro maintainers, real thankless job trying to square the circle on a billion different things like this.
The plugin is potentially a derivative work of both Yosys and GHDL, but that's fine - it's possible to comply with the requirements of both the MIT license and the GPLv2 at the same time. The resulting work is GPLv2-licensed. (To be precise, you also need to preserve any copyright notices from the MIT-licensed project and the text of the MIT license. The MIT license has only one condition, but you do need to follow i…
Your answer and the one from another commenter mention distribution. In this spirit, is there any legal issue with downloading perf and libbfd separately, compiling it, and running using it for yourself only? I assume not? What about using it then as a tool within your company? That might be seen as distribution, and thus not allowed?
There's no legal issue with using it yourself. Debian's problem is that, as a distro, they are creating a single product - the Debian operating system.
Debian could even ship you something that compiles perf against libbfd on your own system. This is the approach they take with ZFS and Linux, which are under incompatible licenses (CDDL and GPLv2): https://bits.debian.org/2016/05/what-does-it-mean-that-zfs-i...
A company is generally a single legal person and so there's no "distribution", but https://www.jolts.world/index.php/jolts/article/view/66/125 is a law review article that discusses the complexities here. If you employ contractors, or if the company as a whole is purchased, the answer is apparently blurrier.
I would like to see a more general approach to solving the problem of "short lived processes are expensive". There needs to be a way to dynamically link a binary into your own address space, and call it's logic repeatedly, without incurring all the process startup overhead all the time. Pretty much, have all command line utilities be linkable like a library.
Afl-fuzz runs a program until main() and then forks it repeatedly. An empty main() can be called at least 10000 times per second this way.
With AFL++ you can even determine exactly where the fork happens:
Your answer and the one from another commenter mention distribution. In this spirit, is there any legal issue with downloading perf and libbfd separately, compiling it, and running using it for yourself only? I assume not? What about using it then as a tool within your company? That might be seen as distribution, and thus not allowed?
There's no legal issue with using it yourself. Debian's problem is that, as a distro, they are creating a single product - the Debian operating system. Debian could even ship you something that compiles perf against libbfd on your own system. This is the approach they take with ZFS and Linux, which are under incompatible licenses (CDDL and GPLv2): https://bits.debian.org/2016/05/what-does-it-mean-that-zfs-i... A comp…
GPLv2 and GPLv3 are difference licences, despite sharing a name. The GNU people (FSF) intentionally made the GPL3 incompatible with GPL2, to enforce the virality of the GPL3 license (which they perceive to be superior to the older GPL2).
The purpose of the GPLv3 was to address the "tivo" clause, where a vendor sells you a device with some modified GPL preloaded software included. You can request the software under GPL, but if you can't load it on the device then the FSF feels that's not very good. So GPLv3 bans that. That, by itself, is inherently an additional restriction not allowed by GPLv2. They don't need to go out of their way or have a conspir…
A couple of interesting posts from Software Freedom Conservancy make it clear that what Tivo did (breaking proprietary software when reinstalling Linux) is allowed, even by the GPLv3 and that allowing reinstall of libre software is a requirement of the GPLv2 license.
GPLv2 and GPLv3 are difference licences, despite sharing a name. The GNU people (FSF) intentionally made the GPL3 incompatible with GPL2, to enforce the virality of the GPL3 license (which they perceive to be superior to the older GPL2).
The purpose of the GPLv3 was to address the "tivo" clause, where a vendor sells you a device with some modified GPL preloaded software included. You can request the software under GPL, but if you can't load it on the device then the FSF feels that's not very good. So GPLv3 bans that. That, by itself, is inherently an additional restriction not allowed by GPLv2. They don't need to go out of their way or have a conspir…
Its also interesting to note that none of the GPL licenses require giving code back, so what Linus wants from the license doesn't happen via the license, only via cultural standards. Indeed, there are many companies and persons violating those cultural standards by not sending patches back to Linus, as well as many companies violating the GPL licenses by not distributing source to their customers.
If they're dead then they're not going to stop you from changing the license. What are they gonna do? Sue you from beyond the grave?
I think copyright is inherited by the heirs (in most cases relatives of the deceased) and carries on quite a long time after death. So the relatives may actually sue you, and any discussion WRT relicensing would have to be addressed to them. I actually consider putting something into my will that states that all my open-source contributions are relicensed to "public domain" (CC0 [1]) once I die. [1] https://creativec…
Its also possible to transfer your copyrights before your death. For example to the FSF or to Software Freedom Conservancy. I hear there are tax implications for copyright bequeathment, which is why transferring copyrights is preferred.
The root cause is copyright. If it were to be abolished, no one would ever have to think about licensing ever again. None of this pain would exist. Think about all the time that would be saved when people no longer need to think about all this lawyer bullshit.
In the absence of copyright things like the GPL would have no power - a company could take your work and bundle it into their product and never contribute anything back ever.
And then you could copy what they produced the result without paying them, I expect the pirate sites would still exist without copyright.