Linus Torvalds said Wednesday that he won’t convert Linux to version 3 of the General Public License, as he objects to digital rights management provisions in the proposed update.
The position is a significant–though not entirely unexpected–rejection of the update, the first to the seminal license in 15 years. Linux, the kernel at the heart of an operating system that clones much of generally proprietary Unix, is considered the best-known and most successful example of open-source software.
“Conversion isn’t going to happen,” Torvalds said in a posting to the Linux kernel mailing list. “I don’t think the GPL v3 conversion is going to happen for the kernel, since I personally don’t want to convert any of my code.”