As far as I know Linus holds the copyright to Linux.
While looking around in the kernel sources, I see that almost every file has it’s own copyright holders. For example the file module.c in the Linux kernel contains:
Copyright (C) 2002 Richard Henderson Copyright (C) 2001 Rusty Russell, 2002, 2010 Rusty
And the COPYING file in the root directory contains:
NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel
services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use
of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".
Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software
Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux
kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.
Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel
is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not
v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.
Linus Torvalds
So if Linus would want to change the license under which Linux is released, wouldn’t he need the permission of all the copyright holders, which are probably 1000’s of people?
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Yes, he would need permission from every person who has contributed code to the project. This is because those people have only given permission to redistribute their code under the GPL.
Some other projects circumvent this by requiring that contributors assign their rights to the project.
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