It might be a bit rough if you're looking in on the issue as an outsider, or if you've never been faced with the dilemma of how to license your product, but you should know that there is an entire spectrum of licenses that could fall under the umbrella of 'free software' i.e. BSD, MIT, and the GPL.

When Linus says the 'extremists' of the free software world, I think, he's mainly refering to where the FSF is taking the GPL[v3] and what this new version proibits.

For more see this post, http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white....