Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Wed, 10 Oct 2001 14:19:03 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Wed, 10 Oct 2001 14:18:53 -0400 Received: from t2.redhat.com ([199.183.24.243]:47351 "EHLO passion.cambridge.redhat.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Wed, 10 Oct 2001 14:18:48 -0400 X-Mailer: exmh version 2.4 06/23/2000 with nmh-1.0.4 From: David Woodhouse X-Accept-Language: en_GB In-Reply-To: In-Reply-To: To: Alan Cox Cc: viro@math.psu.edu (Alexander Viro), kaos@ocs.com.au (Keith Owens), sirmorcant@morcant.org (Morgan Collins [Ax0n]), linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Tainted Modules Help Notices Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 19:18:30 +0100 Message-ID: <4058.1002737910@redhat.com> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk said: > Subject to patent holdings. If you hold a patent on the BSD code you > can't GPL it That's not wonderfully clear. They don't have to _restrict_ your rights - just neglect to grant you the right to use the algorithm in question, which you didn't have in the first place anyway. > nor is it GPL compatible. I believe that statement is as true as the assertion that nobody, even in the Free World, can write GPL'd code which use the algorithms covered by the patent. Either way, I didn't think that a political stance against patents was the point of the kernel tainting code - I thought it was about maintainability. > The problem we have is that "BSD without advertisment" can be claimed > by almost any binary only module whose author doesnt include source or > let it out fo their company ever GPL can also be claimed by a module whose author doesn't publish either the source or the binary, or who charges lots and lots of money for shipping the binary and ships the source with it with a 'request' that the recipient doesn't then give it away for free. But if we're not going to allow BSD-licensed modules to be loaded without tainting the kernel, we shouldn't mark any of the code distributed with the kernel as BSD-licensed - we should make it all "Dual BSD/GPL" instead. It might also be useful to have a 'Dual GPL/Other' option, for covering the other randomly dual-licensed code (like JFFS2). -- dwmw2 - 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/