Free Software RMS Father: Linux contributors do not have permission to revoke code

Recently, the turmoil in the Linux community has caused concern throughout the open source session. After the contributors threatened to withdraw the code from the operating system, several significant open source figures also expressed their views on the incident.

The open source legend Eric S Raymond advocates a peaceful solution. He said: “I urge that we all step back from the edge of this cliff, and I weant [sic] to suggest a basis of principle on which settlement can be negotiated. Every group of cooperating humans has a telos, a mutually understood purpose towards which they are working, a situation in which a subgroup within the Linux kernel’s subculture threatens destructive revolt [because] they think the CoC is an attempt to change the group’s telos.”

As the designer of the GPL license, Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, responded directly to the contributor’s desire to revoke the code. He said that according to the research of himself and a lawyer, GPLv2 is bound, and developers who contribute code to the Linux kernel have no right to revoke these contributions. Stallman disagreed with the contributor’s approach. “But what if they could? What would they achieve by doing so? They would cause harm to the whole free software community. The anonymous person who suggests that Linux contributors do this is urging them to [use a] set of nuclear weapons in pique over an internal matter of the development team for Linux. What a shame that would be.”