Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261892AbTILU6j (ORCPT ); Fri, 12 Sep 2003 16:58:39 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261894AbTILU6j (ORCPT ); Fri, 12 Sep 2003 16:58:39 -0400 Received: from kinesis.swishmail.com ([209.10.110.86]:50696 "HELO kinesis.swishmail.com") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S261892AbTILU6h (ORCPT ); Fri, 12 Sep 2003 16:58:37 -0400 Message-ID: <3F62335B.9050202@techsource.com> Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 16:58:03 -0400 From: Timothy Miller User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: David Schwartz CC: Pascal Schmidt , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: People, not GPL [was: Re: Driver Model] References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1604 Lines: 36 David Schwartz wrote: > However, some people seem to be arguing that the GPL_ONLY symbols are in > fact a license enforcement technique. If that's true, then when they > distribute their code, they are putting additional restrictions not in the > GPL on it. That is a GPL violation. Agreed. GPL_ONLY is not a license restriction. It is a technical issue. Binary-only modules are inherently untrustworthy (no open code review) and undebuggable. It is therefore of technical merit to restrict both what they can access in the kernel (GPL_ONLY) and limit how much kernel developers should have to tolerate when they're involved. But beyond this, there are some social issues. If someone finds a way to work around this mechanism, they are breaking things to everyone else's detriment. For a commercial entity to violate the GPL_ONLY barrier is an insult to kernel developers AND to their customers who will have trouble getting problems solved. So, if a company works around GPL_ONLY, are they violating the GPL license? Probably not. Does that make it OKAY? Probably not. This is like finding a way to give a user space program access to kernel resources. There are barriers put in place for a REASON because people make mistakes when they write software. If no one did, we wouldn't have any need for memory protection, would we. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/