Re: Results of an informal GPLv3 poll amongst kernel contributors

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Fri, 22 Sep 2006, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>
> >
> >These are basically just the votes and who voted.  There's also a nice
> >graphical tally but I'll attach that by replying to this message so it
> >doesn't get eaten by people's "no mime at all" spam filters.
> >
> >Average Vote                          -2.0  +/-   0.7
> 
> No surprise here :)

Well, I actually think there were some surprises to some people.

The people involved with the vote were basically selected to be the most 
active kernel developers (by just doing some trivial statistics over the 
last 18 months and just picking the top ~30 people). I added Alan Cox to 
the list, just because, but basically it's otherwise a totally unbiased 
selection.

And trust me when I say that we're an argumentative lot. Some people 
consider the kernel mailing list to be somewhat argumentative at times, 
but I think people are even more open in their opinions when they're 
allowed to vent freely.

And we certainly had some "heated discussion" over a number of details, 
but as you can see from the actual votes, I think the conclusion people 
had come to (regardless of their opinions on some issues) were more 
uniform than you might have expected.

I think a number of outsiders also believed that I personally was just the 
odd man out, because I've been so publicly not a huge fan of the GPLv3.  

So I think some people who see the results - especially people who haven't 
been active in kernel development themselves - might be surprised to see 
that I wasn't even an outlier in the kernel group.

So I suspect your lack of surprise is because you've been on the kernel 
mailing list for too long, and already know the personalities of the 
people involved.

		Linus