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Comment by bluesign | Hacker News Reader

From what I read court seems to ignore GPL license in this perspective, and totally based decision on copyright law.

In a way, yes. You can only assert the GPL is you are the copyright owner of a work. The court first had to test whether McHardy can actually claim copyright as he did (for the whole Linux kernel) and found that he cannot according to copyright law.

In short: The license only governs the rights you give others relating to what you own. You cannot give (or revoke) a license for things you do not own.

One part kinda confuses me, the article sounds like, Linus Torvalds is the author of the linux and all other contributors are ‘editors’. Do you think this means for example Linus can claim copyright ownership on the whole?

Edit: I mean even there is minimal contribution left from Linus in kernel, if he was the plaintiff here, would result be different?

I'm not familiar with the details of copyright law. But I would think that Linus has contributions in all part of the kernel. It should be possible for him to claim copyright ownership on all of these part, effectively making it impossible for anyone to legitimately use any of those parts of the kernel against his will. Since that probably (!) also means some essential core parts, I would consider that nobody legitimately uses Linux against Linus's will.

He still cannot claim copyright ownership of the whole though, since he did not create everything in the kernel. Commits from other authors still have their own copyright.

> I would consider that nobody legitimately uses Linux against Linus's will.

It's Free Software. As long as you adhere to the GPL2, you don't need to take Linus' will in consideration. It's nice if you do, but he can't take back the licence. If he could, it wouldn't be Free Software.

Linus probably doesn't have contributions (as the code author) in all parts of the kernel anymore, entire subsystems have been created since he transitioned to his more curating role.

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