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I think it is much improved over the early drafts, and I don't think it's a horrible licence. I just don't think it's the same kind of 'great' licence that the GPLv2 is.So in the absence of the GPLv2, I could see myself using the GPLv3. But since I have a better choice, why should I?That said, I try to always be pragmatic, and the fact that I think the GPLv3 is not as good a licence as the GPLv2 is not a 'black and white' question. It's a balancing act. And if there are other advantages to the GPLv3, maybe those other advantages would be big enough to tilt the balance in favour of the GPLv3.Quite frankly, I don't really see any, but if Solaris really is to be released under the GPLv3, maybe the advantage of avoiding unnecessary non-compatible licence issues could be enough of an advantage that it might be worth trying to re-license the Linux kernel under the GPLv3 too.Don't get me wrong -- I think it's unlikely. But I do want to make it clear that I'm not a licence bigot, per se. I think the GPLv2 is clearly the better licence, but licences aren't everything.After all, I use a lot of programs that are under other licences. I might not put a project I start myself under the BSD (or the X11-MIT) licence, but I think it's a great licence, and for other projects it may well be the right one.

I like making strong statements, because I find the discussion interesting. In other words, I actually tend to 'like' arguing. Not mindlessly, but I certainly tend to prefer the discussion a bit more heated, and not just entirely platonic.And making strong arguments occasionally ends up resulting in a very valid rebuttal, and then I'll happily say: "Oh, ok, you're right."But no, that didn't happen on SVN/CVS. I suspect a lot of people really don't much like CVS, so I didn't really even expect anybody to argue that CVS was really anything but a legacy system. And while I've gotten a few people who argued that I shouldn't have been quite so impolite against SVN (and hey, that's fair -- I'm really not a very polite person!), I don't think anybody actually argued that SVN was 'good'.SVN is, I think, a classic case of 'good enough'. It's what people are used to, and it's 'good enough' to be used fairly widely, but it's good enough in exactly the sense DOS and Windows were 'good enough'. Not great technology, just very widely available, and it works well enough for people and looks familiar enough that people use it. But very few people are 'proud' of it, or excited about it.Git, on the other hand, has some of the 'UNIX philosophy' behind it. Not that it is about UNIX, per se, but like original UNIX, it had a fundamental idea behind it. For UNIX, the underlying philosophy was/is that, "Everything is a file." For git, it's, Everything is just an object in the content-addressable database."

I think there's both a licence issue, and a community and personality issue. The BSD licences always encouraged forking, but also meant that if somebody gets really successful and makes a commercial fork, you cannot necessarily join back. And so even if that doesn't actually happen (and it did, in the BSD cases -- with BSDi), people can't really 'trust' each other as much.In contrast, the GPLv2 also encourages forking, but it not only encourages the branching off part, it also encourages (and 'requires') the ability to merge back again. So now you have a whole new level of trust: you 'know' that everybody involved will be bound by the licence, and won't try to take advantage of you.So I see the GPLv2 as the licence that allows people the maximum possible freedom within the requirement that you can always join back together again from either side. Nobody can stop you from taking the improvements to the source code.