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Setting aside the political issue (eg. Torvalds says he prefers GPLv2 for the kernel), is it even possible to change to GPLv3 at this point. Linux doesn't do copyright assignment, which means that they would need to track down and get permission from everyone who has contributed (or remove their contributions) in order to re-license.

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Pretty sure you can't "remove someone's contribution", because derivative works preserve copyright.

Idk if lawyers have weighed in, but many open source contributors are definitely under the impression that if you rewrite/remove all contributions of a contributor you are then free to relicense the resulting work without their permission.

> they would need to track down and get permission from everyone who has contributed

This is not true, not everything in the kernel is GPLv2-only, some parts are GPLv2-or-later (but it's less than the GPLv2-only code).

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