11 ms·

Important Notice Regarding Public Availability of Stable Patches

235 points by dantiberian 11y ago

blm 11y ago
I want to add something. I am sure that it will get obliterated by other people. I am not with anyone that uses grsecurity. On the one hand I can imagine nothing more bitter than other people making money on your hard work. However, isnt this how the whole thing goes? I mean there wouldn't be a linux kernel without the work of a whole bunch of companies. Did they get sponsorship money from you? grsecurity wouldn't exist without the work of a bunch of other people. Did grsecurity pass on money to other vendors that they rely on? What about people that wrote the drivers that grsecurity use when they did development. Open source only works because people contribute to a shared base. In return for their contributions they get to use what others already contributed.
- halosghost 11y ago
  It seems like you've missed the point. The problem isn't that companies are using the work without paying. The problem is that the unnamed companies are essentially lying in their marketing and violating the grsec trademark in the process. This is not how FLOSS is supposed to go.
  - blm 11y ago
    Why do you think they are lying? Did the companies use not apply the grsecurity patches but claim they did? If they did apply the patches AND used the grsecurity trademark in their brochures what is the problem? They arent misrepresenting grsecurity. They arent being derogatory in any way. Why can't you say that you have the kernel and you applied grsecurity patches? It seems so funny when people are all about GPL code and "freedom" and yet act so precious about a "trademark" just like proprietary enterprises.
    - bigiain 11y ago
      From the post: "The aforementioned company has been using the grsecurity name all over its marketing material and blog posts to describe their backported, unsupported, unmaintained version in a version of Linux with other code modifications that haven't been evaluated by us for security impact. Simply put, it is NOT grsecurity" There _are_ no "grsecurity patches" to apply for the system they're using the grsecurity trademark on. Seems pretty clear cut from here.
    - teraflop 11y ago
      The whole point of trademark law is that the owner of the trademark gets to control how it's used in commerce. If the mark is being used to advertise a company's product, grsecurity has the right to prohibit it; the company doesn't get to make the call. This isn't a free-speech issue -- it's just a simple acknowledgement of the fact that consumers treat names, logos, branding etc. as indicators of a product's origin, and that there's a public interest in making those indicators accurate. You can refer to the trademark as long as you don't do so in a way that misrepresents your product. In this case, unless there are specific disclaimers to the contrary, a reasonable person would think "grsecurity" means "code released and approved by the grsecurity team", instead of a version that a third party has modified.
dijit 11y ago
This angers me. I mean, they're doing the right thing, but it should never have come to this. volunteers shouldn't be shelling out thousands in copyright and licensing violations- even if they won in court, the amount awarded back would probably be a pittance compared to what these manufacturers make by using their code/trademarks. I love what the pax guys do, almost every major exploit in the last year is mitigated in some form by grsec.. I wonder what becoming a sponsor entails.. I mean, I wish I could support all the FOSS I use, but I'd go broke pretty quick. :(
- lucb1e 11y ago
  > I mean, I wish I could support all the FOSS I use, but I'd go broke pretty quick. :( Yeah I seem to have that a lot as well. What I figured a while ago, in summary, is this: we will always use more than we can contribute back. As a silly example, I am grateful for the invention of the wheel but in no way could I pay someone back (living or dead) for every single thing like that. The important thing is that we do something. Contribute either with time and skill or with money to a few projects you care about and which you feel can actually use your help. That's still tricky, though, I wouldn't know which of the 2100 installed apt-get packages need my support the most, but realizing this (rather than feeling indebted) gives me some peace of mind. (If anyone cares, I actually blogged about this: http://lucb1e.com/?p=post&id=121 http://lucb1e.com/?p=post&id=121 )
0x0 11y ago
That's a shame. :( Also a shame that it's probably going to be way too expensive to lawyer up something like the Firefox an RedHat style of trademark protection (where forks (or even re-compiles) must use off-label branding). :( Also a shame that the companies in question can't even be named (and shamed)...
- zobzu 11y ago
  Veriphone https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3938&p=13940#p13940 https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3938&p=139... There, shamed. Easy.
Animats 11y ago
OK, figure out who the involved is. It shouldn't be too hard if you're active in that area.
- crazysim 11y ago
  I'm going to guess it's the top result from the Google search of the forums for EFI and grsecurity? That or the wind is blowing me the wrong way down the river.
  - gnoway 11y ago
    This would be really surprising and disappointing. Wind River used to be a/the major FreeBSD sponsor and is now owned by Intel. Intel of course is heavily invested in the Linux and FOSS community.
    - fredkbloggs 11y ago
      Intel's commitment is to specific products and technologies that it has determined are either in great market demand or are checkbox items in support of its other products. The company has no affinity whatsoever to Free Software or Open Source ideals, and most of its products are closed-source and protected with extremely restrictive licenses. This is especially true in the space at issue here; Intel does not make its firmware available under anything resembling Open Source terms. The same applies to its CPU microcode, most of its specifications, and the large body of tooling used by OEMs and embedded developers (much of which is not only closed but Windows-only). Intel is committed to supporting GNU/Linux distributions offered by its partners or as demanded by the market at large, but in general it remains an extremely closed, secretive vendor.
      - gnoway 11y ago
        They run the open source technology center (http://01.org http://01.org). Even if their actual goal is exploitation, why would they even blink at 5 figures a year to sponsor this group vs. giving their lawyers something to do and risking exposure like this?
NeutronBoy 11y ago
The test series, unfit in our view for production use, will however continue to be available to the public Doesn't sound like that will stop companies from picking it up and using it unfortunately. This is such a shit situation to be in. Hopefully this publicity gains them some traction with the companies and communities who do care about it.
halosghost 11y ago
This is such a bummer! I just recently switched over to grsec (on Arch) and I could not be happier with the results; seriously, it has made such a huge increse in security so simple to navigate. The Grsec team does incredible work; that no lawyer is willing to pursue this case saddens me, but that's a secondary issue. The core problem here is the corporations with money have functionally unlimited legal authority. It is so far beyond me that society has allowed this to come to be and continues to do nothing to stop it. To Brad and the PaX team directly (if you read this): You do incredible work and I sincerely hope this move leads to an inundation of sponsorship so that even more people can benefit from your hard work and innovation. Till then, know that there are those of us that stand behind you 100 percent!
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ploxiln 11y ago
"Since our lawyer has advised us not to mention the companies by name" Yeah, uh, they're lawyers, they always say that, it's not a signal with any information in it. As you said, this company can outspend you, and it's not worth it for you to try litigating. Public shaming is all you have! And, since the primary issue was them claiming their kernel has "grsecurity", public shaming is actually a great solution: try to make the technical community aware that this company's security hardening doesn't deserve the "grsecurity" description. You may even get more business from competitors who want to be able to say they worked with you on their grsecurity integration.
- ars 11y ago
  I suspect they are hoping the public will do it for them. They gave enough clues for that. That way they said it, without actually saying it.
- michael_storm 11y ago
  The lawyers say that because they're advising their clients not to set themselves up for a libel suit, not because they're buzzkills. In other news, doctors recommend you eat healthy, but don't they always say that?
  - ploxiln 11y ago
    ya know... my mother is a doctor, a Family Practitioner (FP). She's the type who's probably more frank with her patients than most. But she still would give slightly different advice to family than to patients. This is to manage risk of lawsuits, unreasonably angry patients, etc. It has to do with the balance of risk and blame. You can imagine the typical stuff - excessive tests, end-of-life decisions...
JohnTHaller 11y ago
As a general rule, smaller companies that release their code under the GPL have almost no recourse against huge companies violating their copyrights. One of the big flash drive makers released their own portable browser based on PortableApps.com's Firefox Portable a few years back and distributed it on millions of drives with my name and all copyrights stripped off of it. This happened after I'd been in negotiations with them about using our software platform and fully informed their subsidiary in charge of their resulting software platform of the legal obligations of the GPL including a direct call with the subsidiary's CEO. The most I could do was send them a C&D. To add insult to injury, the subsidiary released a hardware product years later and another company released a similar but different product in the same segment. The subsidiary sued the other company and had this PR story published about how the CEO was so offended by the "theft" and had to sue them to be able to look his kids in the face.
- themartorana 11y ago
  What about the DMCA? It seems like people cower in fear of it, but only with regards to the entertainment industry. Is that only because it's dangerous when the copyright holder is a huge corporation, but remains effectively toothless for those unable to support years of litigation?
  - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    The DMCA safe harbor applies to intermediaries. It essentially says nobody can sue YouTube for the copyright infringement of its users if they take down user content on request. The problem with it is that the intermediaries have no practical way of knowing whether the user who posted the content had a legal right to, so it causes everybody execute takedown requests regardless of merit. People violating the GPL usually aren't intermediaries. If they don't get the safe harbor to begin with then they can't lose it by not following the takedown process. I wonder if an intermediary could be found though. If an infringer is hosting their website on AWS, what happens when somebody sends a takedown notice to Amazon?
    - ijk 11y ago
vini 11y ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=grsecurity+forum+patch+ported https://www.google.com/search?q=grsecurity+forum+patch+porte...
coderjames 11y ago
I'm obviously misunderstanding something about this. Since grsecurity is GPL'd (being modifications to the GPL'd kernel), anyone that is "a customer of any product that uses grsecurity in binary form, [is] entitled to the complete corresponding source code." Which means their stable patches will get requested and released by someone anyway. Help me understand how this will have any effect on the actual availability of their stable series?
- ars 11y ago
  The sponsors use it (Kernel+Grsecurity), they don't distribute it. Since they don't distribute it, they also don't distribute the patches.
  - ploxiln 11y ago
    That assumes that the sponsors don't distribute operating systems or devices containing them, only services in the cloud (or user-space software). And even still, they could re-distribute the grsecurity code if they wanted to. But they probably won't bother. So yes this private-patches policy will have a big impact on availability, at least on convenience.
  - coderjames 11y ago
    Ah, that makes sense. I didn't look into what businesses the sponsors were in.
- awalton 11y ago
  It basically just adds a level of indirection. Rather than going straight to the grsecurity folks, you now have to go to whichever downstream is disseminating the kernel based on that patch. Bummer. Really, it's just weakening the brand they've created for themselves. It always sounds really great in theory, but it's almost never worth it. It's the GPL, they've literally signed up for this type of code (ab)use. I'm not sure why people have trouble understanding this concept. (Though if they wanted to be really snarky, they'd relicense their code GPLv3 and watch these companies go into complete hysterics.)
RaleyField 11y ago
> We decided that it is unfair to _our sponsors_ that the above mentioned unlawful players can get away with their activity. How is that unfair to them specifically? The purpose of this is to protect them by raising a paywall for anyone that isn't their 'sponsor'? (tangentially, that's why I prefer BSD/MIT, because people aren't as obsessed with other people doing dirty, nasty things with their free code.) It's bad enough that these patches aren't integrated into the kernel like they ought to be or that they aren't included into mainline distros and are only ever present on custom built machines, now they are behind paywall as well. Damit, I don't want to move to OpenBSD.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  > Damit, I don't want to move to OpenBSD. Why not? OpenBSD's awesome.
  - na85 11y ago
    Maybe for servers. It's completely unusable due to performance problems on my i7-powered thinkpad.
    - lnufnu 11y ago
      "The test series, unfit in our view for production use, will however continue to be available to the public to avoid impact to the Gentoo Hardened and Arch Linux communities." Why would you have to migrate to OpenBSD? Is the test series unstable?
      - mfukar 11y ago
        Well, it's not called "stable".
    - bmir-alum-007 11y ago
      One risk of using OpenBSD is a lot, but not quite enough, people use it on enough on random hardware and give actionable feedback to make it battle-tested, "Just Work" (TM).
performa 11y ago
Sounds like Verifone is one of the GPL violators. They are known for being "open" except when you want to innovate without permission. http://global.verifone.com/products/software/v-os/ http://global.verifone.com/products/software/v-os/ - Says its Linux Based. http://www.verifone.com/products/hardware/multimedia/ http://www.verifone.com/products/hardware/multimedia/ - Have an MX 900 series of products. http://www.verifone.com/products/hardware/petro-pos-systems/ http://www.verifone.com/products/hardware/petro-pos-systems/ - Have a Petro series of Products NYSE:PAY - are a multi-billion dollar company. Employee asking for help: https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3938&p=13940#p13940 https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3938&p=139... GRsec saying its verifone: https://twitter.com/grsecurity/status/450995354972864513 https://twitter.com/grsecurity/status/450995354972864513 Thread indicating they are using an old unmaintained kernel: https://twitter.com/grsecurity/status/424914478912651264 https://twitter.com/grsecurity/status/424914478912651264 Industry called out specifically: "Not only has the entire embedded industry as a whole not contributed a single dime toward our continued development and maintenance (despite our work being critical to the security of the millions of devices using our code: streaming media players, credit card processing systems, etc), the companies we've identified have actively violated the GPL and even our trademark. These transgressions have continued despite their awareness and our legal action."
CodeMage 11y ago
Naive question: can't EFF help?
- RaleyField 11y ago
  Linus should've helped. But they don't want to merge patches to the kernel. Use OpenBSD.
  - mburns 11y ago
    > But they don't want to merge patches to the kernel. To be clear, the 'they' in that sentence are the authors of GRSecurity, not the kernel developers.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      Are you sure about that? From what I heard Torvalds refuses to merge patches from folks who won't identify themselves[0], and the PaX Team refuses to reveal the membership of the team. [0] This is a perfectly reasonable policy.
      - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
        The problem is they're both right.
        simoncion 11y ago
        Pardon me, I'm confused. Who is "they" in your statement? Is it the mass "you"? Is it referring to my statement and mburns's statement? If it is, then can you provide a first-hand citation that supports mburns's statement? AIUI, the GRSec folks don't gain anything by keeping their patches out of tree. If they could merge them in, they should.
        mburns 11y ago
        GRSecurity devs have actively avoided submitting the patches into mainline. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/59020/why-are-the-grsecurity-patches-not-included-in-the-vanilla-kernel/59039#59039 http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/59020/why-are-the-gr... Someone should really break up the patchset and submit it upstream as discrete features.
AaronFriel 11y ago
Looks like the product in question is Wind River Linux, a product of a subsidiary of Intel. Here's the forum post on backporting an EFI fix: https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3713 https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3713 And products with Wind River Linux prominently mentions GRSecurity advertisements: https://www.google.com/search?q=wind+river+linux+grsecurity https://www.google.com/search?q=wind+river+linux+grsecurity Edit: It looks like I wasn't the only one to find this. I'll keep this post at the top for other people to reply to.
- na85 11y ago
  That's infuriating.
- chowder 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure Wind River Linux is using kernel versions grsecurity would approve of. https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3938&p=13940#p13940 https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3938&p=139... seems more likely to indicate the problem company.
sarciszewski 11y ago
Can we as a society stop ripping off open source developers? Companies that do are essentially stealing from artisans to build infrastructure to defraud the poor so they can horde wealth.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  Yeah, we just have to find their project page, hope they have a PayPal or Stripe or other donation link (that accepts a currency we already have, sorry I own no Bitcoin)... And then donate. For every developer or project. I don't know about most of the engineers whose work powers my internet use. How do I donate to people I don't know about?
  - strcat 11y ago
    The grsecurity brand is a registered trademark and spender has the right to control how it's used. If you ship a product with the official grsecurity patch applied, you get to say it uses a grsecurity kernel in your marketing. If you want to use anything but the latest official/test kernels, then you need to make it clear that it's not grsecurity (but rather your port) or pay official support with all of the backporting, auditing and testing that entails. I'm working on a product using my own port of PaX/grsecurity and I had no problem understanding and complying with spender's wishes about this.
    - sarciszewski 11y ago
      I think this was a dupe.
- cwyers 11y ago
  Actual GPL violations are bad. If actual trademark infringement happened (the blog post presents the company's counterarguement as to whether or not that happened, and I neither know enough about the law to assess the competing claims or know enough about the situation to know whether or not the blogpost fairly represented the counterarguement), that's bad. But "[not] bother[ing] to hire us to perform the port properly for them or to actively maintain the security of the kernel they're providing to their paid customers" isn't ripping off the developers or stealing from artisans. Nor is "not contribut[ing] a single dime toward our continued development and maintenance." None of those things are required by the GPL. If you want to sell software, and if you want to get pissed when people use your software without paying you for it, choose a license that requires people to pay you for your software. (And exactly how much money has GRsecurity paid to the developers of the kernel they're patching? The unmitigated gall factor here is stronger than most of these kinds of rants that I've seen, because they're not even the upstream.)
pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
FUCK EVERYONE.
armitron 11y ago
Ah Spender. Always the drama queen. The real problem here is not companies abusing the GPL (good luck with that), but grsecurity not being integrated with mainline after more than a decade. You see, if Spender really cared about security he would work with the kernel developers in order to get grsecurity into the kernel but of course being such a famewhore, he never did that. Everything is fine as long as he is the center of attention, actual security be damned. Spender: I among many have little sympathy for you, you've long exhausted our patience with your antics. Grsecurity is a niche project with minimal actual security impact in the "real world", all because of the deranged way you choose to manage it. Your primary concern, your _ONLY_ concern should be getting grsecurity into the kernel, not companies ripping you off, not companies abusing your trademark, not companies "not playing nice". In the grand scheme of things, these are irrelevant.
- dewyatt 11y ago
  Do you mean Spengler, perhaps?
  - adamzochowski 11y ago
    I think "spendy" is his irc nick. And "spender" is his grsec machine nick https://www.grsecurity.net/~spender/ https://www.grsecurity.net/~spender/
- csirac2 11y ago
  I can appreciate that it's been a bit like that, but isn't the truth really somewhere in between? Oversized egos are a problem at the best of times in open source, especially in the kernel. Which has traditionally had a culture of casual indifference toward the security priorities of PaX/grsec, and some would say toward security generally (I don't buy that - there's a lot of concern for integrity in the kernel, and that at least buys you some security). Whilst it would have been great if Spender could have completely changed his personality, outlook and perspective on the world so that he could commandeer the linux kernel from the outside-in toward his vision of a safer kernel, is that really compatible with the wider project? And so, it's equally depressing there hasn't been more recruitment from the kernel side - the side that actually has resources - to figure out a path toward getting PaX stuff mainlined from the inside-out. I guess my point is: grsec has one focus, one priority. But the Linux kernel is a project that has a much more vast, broader scope of competing priorities to untangle, and I just can't see that such an enormous, busy and byzantine project ecosystem truly will ever see a clear mandate to get something as disruptive and single-minded as grsec mainlined. Not only would Spender have to become a different person, but the core kernel teams as well. In any case, I've reduced my patreon donations and put what little that is towards grsecurity. It's certainly that important and useful to me.
Asbostos 11y ago
It's not clear to me that he has any case at all with the trademark. You don't get to dictate how everyone uses your trademark. Some uses are acceptable without permission: "Usually it is permissible to use another person’s or company’s trademark or service mark when referring to a product or service of that person or company, provided it is clear that the mark is being used truthfully to refer to that specific product or service. It may not be used in a way that might mislead others as to that person’s or company’s affiliation with, sponsorship of or endorsement of your company or its products or services—for example, using a logo instead of simply the word form of the mark, or using the mark more prominently or frequently than necessary." [1] This appears to be how Wind River is using it. [1] http://www.inta.org/TrademarkBasics/FactSheets/Pages/TrademarkUseFactSheet.aspx http://www.inta.org/TrademarkBasics/FactSheets/Pages/Tradema...
- randx838 11y ago
  Agreed. I could see this being possible with a pre-existing trademark policy, and an explicitly different trademark for "test quality" code, and being very careful about it all, but otherwise I just don't see it. Trademark is to correctly identify the source of a good, and the source here is identified correctly. If it was creative commons licensed, they would be required to do what they have done. Not only all that, it seems like this is a bit strange that their complaint is that they called it grsecurity without using a blessed version, so their response is to stop giving out blessed versions publicly. Won't that just encourage more companies to do exactly what they are complaining about?
  - davorak 11y ago
    > Won't that just encourage more companies to do exactly what they are complaining about? It will become much harder for any company to argue the they are using grsecurity if they are not a sponsor since it is not public disseminated any more. This should give their lawyers considerable more leverage and the offending company's lawyers are more likely to warn discourage stone walling the grsecurity team since the company will be in a weaker position.
    - 11y ago
bmir-alum-007 11y ago
Most, but not all, companies generally don't donate any money to server OSes and open source they deploy by the hundreds of thousands. It sucks but it's the current state of affairs. (I think more FOSS should be be less free and monetized more in the context of large-scale enterprise purposes, in order to keep developers' bills paid and support quality up. The honor system doesn't work because most corporate choose to "cheat" where possible.) If a project releases open source totally for free, it cannot realistically expect sponsorship to magically appear. If a project needs sponsorship to keep the lights on, the we're closing up shop, unless ... routine works. If a project prefers to become a commercial product with a freemium option, they should do such. Otherwise, don't slave away on a project and resent what you cannot afford to give away. Just don't do it, if you can't live with it being exploited by companies for free. Punishing everyone for the sin of a few rogue companies is the kindergarteners routine and childish. It doesn't work and it just angers people without solving the licensing issue at a core level. PS: Perhaps grsecurity may want to instead consider a sensible noncommercial license similar to somewhere between AGPL and something like what good ol' evil Oracle would license their DBMS, i.e., companies over X employees or Y revenue need a license; hobbyists, academics and individual developers exempted. Drama resolved.
- geofft 11y ago
  > PS: Perhaps grsecurity may want to instead consider a sensible noncommercial license similar to somewhere between AGPL and something like what good ol' evil Oracle would license their DBMS, i.e., companies over X employees or Y revenue need a license; hobbyists, academics and individual developers exempted. Drama resolved. Being a set of Linux patches, it would be hard for them not to make their code available under GPLv2. They can do the Red Hat thing of making code available only to paying customers, and terminating their customers' accounts if they redistribute things publicly. They mention that in the post.
- stevejones 11y ago
  This isn't about money, this is about abuse of the trademark.
dfc 11y ago
There are a lot of people complaining about a future w/o grsecurity and I share your feelings. However I was surprised to see that nobody has mentioned that you and I can also donate to the project. Yes, it sucks that MegaCorp and InnoTrode are not compensating Grsecurity for the work. Its probably just as shitty that I have used grsecurity for as long as I have and just got around to donating to the project. If you use grsecurity and don't want to see it disappear go donate. Grsecurity accepts paypal/bitcoin/dwolla: https://grsecurity.net/contribute.php https://grsecurity.net/contribute.php

235 points by dantiberian 11y ago

blm 11y ago

I want to add something. I am sure that it will get obliterated by other people. I am not with anyone that uses grsecurity. On the one hand I can imagine nothing more bitter than other people making money on your hard work. However, isnt this how the whole thing goes? I mean there wouldn't be a linux kernel without the work of a whole bunch of companies. Did they get sponsorship money from you? grsecurity wouldn't exist without the work of a bunch of other people. Did grsecurity pass on money to other vendors that they rely on? What about people that wrote the drivers that grsecurity use when they did development. Open source only works because people contribute to a shared base. In return for their contributions they get to use what others already contributed.

halosghost 11y ago
It seems like you've missed the point. The problem isn't that companies are using the work without paying. The problem is that the unnamed companies are essentially lying in their marketing and violating the grsec trademark in the process. This is not how FLOSS is supposed to go.
- blm 11y ago
  Why do you think they are lying? Did the companies use not apply the grsecurity patches but claim they did? If they did apply the patches AND used the grsecurity trademark in their brochures what is the problem? They arent misrepresenting grsecurity. They arent being derogatory in any way. Why can't you say that you have the kernel and you applied grsecurity patches? It seems so funny when people are all about GPL code and "freedom" and yet act so precious about a "trademark" just like proprietary enterprises.
  - bigiain 11y ago
    From the post: "The aforementioned company has been using the grsecurity name all over its marketing material and blog posts to describe their backported, unsupported, unmaintained version in a version of Linux with other code modifications that haven't been evaluated by us for security impact. Simply put, it is NOT grsecurity" There _are_ no "grsecurity patches" to apply for the system they're using the grsecurity trademark on. Seems pretty clear cut from here.
  - teraflop 11y ago
    The whole point of trademark law is that the owner of the trademark gets to control how it's used in commerce. If the mark is being used to advertise a company's product, grsecurity has the right to prohibit it; the company doesn't get to make the call. This isn't a free-speech issue -- it's just a simple acknowledgement of the fact that consumers treat names, logos, branding etc. as indicators of a product's origin, and that there's a public interest in making those indicators accurate. You can refer to the trademark as long as you don't do so in a way that misrepresents your product. In this case, unless there are specific disclaimers to the contrary, a reasonable person would think "grsecurity" means "code released and approved by the grsecurity team", instead of a version that a third party has modified.

dijit 11y ago

This angers me. I mean, they're doing the right thing, but it should never have come to this. volunteers shouldn't be shelling out thousands in copyright and licensing violations- even if they won in court, the amount awarded back would probably be a pittance compared to what these manufacturers make by using their code/trademarks. I love what the pax guys do, almost every major exploit in the last year is mitigated in some form by grsec.. I wonder what becoming a sponsor entails.. I mean, I wish I could support all the FOSS I use, but I'd go broke pretty quick. :(

lucb1e 11y ago
> I mean, I wish I could support all the FOSS I use, but I'd go broke pretty quick. :( Yeah I seem to have that a lot as well. What I figured a while ago, in summary, is this: we will always use more than we can contribute back. As a silly example, I am grateful for the invention of the wheel but in no way could I pay someone back (living or dead) for every single thing like that. The important thing is that we do something. Contribute either with time and skill or with money to a few projects you care about and which you feel can actually use your help. That's still tricky, though, I wouldn't know which of the 2100 installed apt-get packages need my support the most, but realizing this (rather than feeling indebted) gives me some peace of mind. (If anyone cares, I actually blogged about this: http://lucb1e.com/?p=post&id=121 http://lucb1e.com/?p=post&id=121 )

0x0 11y ago

That's a shame. :( Also a shame that it's probably going to be way too expensive to lawyer up something like the Firefox an RedHat style of trademark protection (where forks (or even re-compiles) must use off-label branding). :( Also a shame that the companies in question can't even be named (and shamed)...

zobzu 11y ago
Veriphone https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3938&p=13940#p13940 https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3938&p=139... There, shamed. Easy.

Animats 11y ago

OK, figure out who the involved is. It shouldn't be too hard if you're active in that area.

crazysim 11y ago
I'm going to guess it's the top result from the Google search of the forums for EFI and grsecurity? That or the wind is blowing me the wrong way down the river.
- gnoway 11y ago
  This would be really surprising and disappointing. Wind River used to be a/the major FreeBSD sponsor and is now owned by Intel. Intel of course is heavily invested in the Linux and FOSS community.
  - fredkbloggs 11y ago
    Intel's commitment is to specific products and technologies that it has determined are either in great market demand or are checkbox items in support of its other products. The company has no affinity whatsoever to Free Software or Open Source ideals, and most of its products are closed-source and protected with extremely restrictive licenses. This is especially true in the space at issue here; Intel does not make its firmware available under anything resembling Open Source terms. The same applies to its CPU microcode, most of its specifications, and the large body of tooling used by OEMs and embedded developers (much of which is not only closed but Windows-only). Intel is committed to supporting GNU/Linux distributions offered by its partners or as demanded by the market at large, but in general it remains an extremely closed, secretive vendor.
    - gnoway 11y ago
      They run the open source technology center (http://01.org http://01.org). Even if their actual goal is exploitation, why would they even blink at 5 figures a year to sponsor this group vs. giving their lawyers something to do and risking exposure like this?

NeutronBoy 11y ago

The test series, unfit in our view for production use, will however continue to be available to the public Doesn't sound like that will stop companies from picking it up and using it unfortunately. This is such a shit situation to be in. Hopefully this publicity gains them some traction with the companies and communities who do care about it.

halosghost 11y ago

This is such a bummer! I just recently switched over to grsec (on Arch) and I could not be happier with the results; seriously, it has made such a huge increse in security so simple to navigate. The Grsec team does incredible work; that no lawyer is willing to pursue this case saddens me, but that's a secondary issue. The core problem here is the corporations with money have functionally unlimited legal authority. It is so far beyond me that society has allowed this to come to be and continues to do nothing to stop it. To Brad and the PaX team directly (if you read this): You do incredible work and I sincerely hope this move leads to an inundation of sponsorship so that even more people can benefit from your hard work and innovation. Till then, know that there are those of us that stand behind you 100 percent!

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

ploxiln 11y ago

"Since our lawyer has advised us not to mention the companies by name" Yeah, uh, they're lawyers, they always say that, it's not a signal with any information in it. As you said, this company can outspend you, and it's not worth it for you to try litigating. Public shaming is all you have! And, since the primary issue was them claiming their kernel has "grsecurity", public shaming is actually a great solution: try to make the technical community aware that this company's security hardening doesn't deserve the "grsecurity" description. You may even get more business from competitors who want to be able to say they worked with you on their grsecurity integration.

ars 11y ago
I suspect they are hoping the public will do it for them. They gave enough clues for that. That way they said it, without actually saying it.
michael_storm 11y ago
The lawyers say that because they're advising their clients not to set themselves up for a libel suit, not because they're buzzkills. In other news, doctors recommend you eat healthy, but don't they always say that?
- ploxiln 11y ago
  ya know... my mother is a doctor, a Family Practitioner (FP). She's the type who's probably more frank with her patients than most. But she still would give slightly different advice to family than to patients. This is to manage risk of lawsuits, unreasonably angry patients, etc. It has to do with the balance of risk and blame. You can imagine the typical stuff - excessive tests, end-of-life decisions...

JohnTHaller 11y ago

As a general rule, smaller companies that release their code under the GPL have almost no recourse against huge companies violating their copyrights. One of the big flash drive makers released their own portable browser based on PortableApps.com's Firefox Portable a few years back and distributed it on millions of drives with my name and all copyrights stripped off of it. This happened after I'd been in negotiations with them about using our software platform and fully informed their subsidiary in charge of their resulting software platform of the legal obligations of the GPL including a direct call with the subsidiary's CEO. The most I could do was send them a C&D. To add insult to injury, the subsidiary released a hardware product years later and another company released a similar but different product in the same segment. The subsidiary sued the other company and had this PR story published about how the CEO was so offended by the "theft" and had to sue them to be able to look his kids in the face.

themartorana 11y ago
What about the DMCA? It seems like people cower in fear of it, but only with regards to the entertainment industry. Is that only because it's dangerous when the copyright holder is a huge corporation, but remains effectively toothless for those unable to support years of litigation?
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  The DMCA safe harbor applies to intermediaries. It essentially says nobody can sue YouTube for the copyright infringement of its users if they take down user content on request. The problem with it is that the intermediaries have no practical way of knowing whether the user who posted the content had a legal right to, so it causes everybody execute takedown requests regardless of merit. People violating the GPL usually aren't intermediaries. If they don't get the safe harbor to begin with then they can't lose it by not following the takedown process. I wonder if an intermediary could be found though. If an infringer is hosting their website on AWS, what happens when somebody sends a takedown notice to Amazon?
  - ijk 11y ago

vini 11y ago

https://www.google.com/search?q=grsecurity+forum+patch+ported https://www.google.com/search?q=grsecurity+forum+patch+porte...

coderjames 11y ago

I'm obviously misunderstanding something about this. Since grsecurity is GPL'd (being modifications to the GPL'd kernel), anyone that is "a customer of any product that uses grsecurity in binary form, [is] entitled to the complete corresponding source code." Which means their stable patches will get requested and released by someone anyway. Help me understand how this will have any effect on the actual availability of their stable series?

ars 11y ago
The sponsors use it (Kernel+Grsecurity), they don't distribute it. Since they don't distribute it, they also don't distribute the patches.
- ploxiln 11y ago
  That assumes that the sponsors don't distribute operating systems or devices containing them, only services in the cloud (or user-space software). And even still, they could re-distribute the grsecurity code if they wanted to. But they probably won't bother. So yes this private-patches policy will have a big impact on availability, at least on convenience.
- coderjames 11y ago
  Ah, that makes sense. I didn't look into what businesses the sponsors were in.
awalton 11y ago
It basically just adds a level of indirection. Rather than going straight to the grsecurity folks, you now have to go to whichever downstream is disseminating the kernel based on that patch. Bummer. Really, it's just weakening the brand they've created for themselves. It always sounds really great in theory, but it's almost never worth it. It's the GPL, they've literally signed up for this type of code (ab)use. I'm not sure why people have trouble understanding this concept. (Though if they wanted to be really snarky, they'd relicense their code GPLv3 and watch these companies go into complete hysterics.)

RaleyField 11y ago

> We decided that it is unfair to _our sponsors_ that the above mentioned unlawful players can get away with their activity. How is that unfair to them specifically? The purpose of this is to protect them by raising a paywall for anyone that isn't their 'sponsor'? (tangentially, that's why I prefer BSD/MIT, because people aren't as obsessed with other people doing dirty, nasty things with their free code.) It's bad enough that these patches aren't integrated into the kernel like they ought to be or that they aren't included into mainline distros and are only ever present on custom built machines, now they are behind paywall as well. Damit, I don't want to move to OpenBSD.

yellowapple 11y ago
> Damit, I don't want to move to OpenBSD. Why not? OpenBSD's awesome.
- na85 11y ago
  Maybe for servers. It's completely unusable due to performance problems on my i7-powered thinkpad.
  - lnufnu 11y ago
    "The test series, unfit in our view for production use, will however continue to be available to the public to avoid impact to the Gentoo Hardened and Arch Linux communities." Why would you have to migrate to OpenBSD? Is the test series unstable?
    - mfukar 11y ago
      Well, it's not called "stable".
  - bmir-alum-007 11y ago
    One risk of using OpenBSD is a lot, but not quite enough, people use it on enough on random hardware and give actionable feedback to make it battle-tested, "Just Work" (TM).

performa 11y ago

Sounds like Verifone is one of the GPL violators. They are known for being "open" except when you want to innovate without permission. http://global.verifone.com/products/software/v-os/ http://global.verifone.com/products/software/v-os/ - Says its Linux Based. http://www.verifone.com/products/hardware/multimedia/ http://www.verifone.com/products/hardware/multimedia/ - Have an MX 900 series of products. http://www.verifone.com/products/hardware/petro-pos-systems/ http://www.verifone.com/products/hardware/petro-pos-systems/ - Have a Petro series of Products NYSE:PAY - are a multi-billion dollar company. Employee asking for help: https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3938&p=13940#p13940 https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3938&p=139... GRsec saying its verifone: https://twitter.com/grsecurity/status/450995354972864513 https://twitter.com/grsecurity/status/450995354972864513 Thread indicating they are using an old unmaintained kernel: https://twitter.com/grsecurity/status/424914478912651264 https://twitter.com/grsecurity/status/424914478912651264 Industry called out specifically: "Not only has the entire embedded industry as a whole not contributed a single dime toward our continued development and maintenance (despite our work being critical to the security of the millions of devices using our code: streaming media players, credit card processing systems, etc), the companies we've identified have actively violated the GPL and even our trademark. These transgressions have continued despite their awareness and our legal action."

CodeMage 11y ago

Naive question: can't EFF help?

RaleyField 11y ago
Linus should've helped. But they don't want to merge patches to the kernel. Use OpenBSD.
- mburns 11y ago
  > But they don't want to merge patches to the kernel. To be clear, the 'they' in that sentence are the authors of GRSecurity, not the kernel developers.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    Are you sure about that? From what I heard Torvalds refuses to merge patches from folks who won't identify themselves[0], and the PaX Team refuses to reveal the membership of the team. [0] This is a perfectly reasonable policy.
    - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
      The problem is they're both right.
      - simoncion 11y ago
        Pardon me, I'm confused. Who is "they" in your statement? Is it the mass "you"? Is it referring to my statement and mburns's statement? If it is, then can you provide a first-hand citation that supports mburns's statement? AIUI, the GRSec folks don't gain anything by keeping their patches out of tree. If they could merge them in, they should.
        mburns 11y ago
        GRSecurity devs have actively avoided submitting the patches into mainline. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/59020/why-are-the-grsecurity-patches-not-included-in-the-vanilla-kernel/59039#59039 http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/59020/why-are-the-gr... Someone should really break up the patchset and submit it upstream as discrete features.

AaronFriel 11y ago

Looks like the product in question is Wind River Linux, a product of a subsidiary of Intel. Here's the forum post on backporting an EFI fix: https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3713 https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3713 And products with Wind River Linux prominently mentions GRSecurity advertisements: https://www.google.com/search?q=wind+river+linux+grsecurity https://www.google.com/search?q=wind+river+linux+grsecurity Edit: It looks like I wasn't the only one to find this. I'll keep this post at the top for other people to reply to.

na85 11y ago
That's infuriating.
chowder 11y ago
I'm pretty sure Wind River Linux is using kernel versions grsecurity would approve of. https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3938&p=13940#p13940 https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3938&p=139... seems more likely to indicate the problem company.

sarciszewski 11y ago

Can we as a society stop ripping off open source developers? Companies that do are essentially stealing from artisans to build infrastructure to defraud the poor so they can horde wealth.

stephengillie 11y ago
Yeah, we just have to find their project page, hope they have a PayPal or Stripe or other donation link (that accepts a currency we already have, sorry I own no Bitcoin)... And then donate. For every developer or project. I don't know about most of the engineers whose work powers my internet use. How do I donate to people I don't know about?
- strcat 11y ago
  The grsecurity brand is a registered trademark and spender has the right to control how it's used. If you ship a product with the official grsecurity patch applied, you get to say it uses a grsecurity kernel in your marketing. If you want to use anything but the latest official/test kernels, then you need to make it clear that it's not grsecurity (but rather your port) or pay official support with all of the backporting, auditing and testing that entails. I'm working on a product using my own port of PaX/grsecurity and I had no problem understanding and complying with spender's wishes about this.
  - sarciszewski 11y ago
    I think this was a dupe.
cwyers 11y ago
Actual GPL violations are bad. If actual trademark infringement happened (the blog post presents the company's counterarguement as to whether or not that happened, and I neither know enough about the law to assess the competing claims or know enough about the situation to know whether or not the blogpost fairly represented the counterarguement), that's bad. But "[not] bother[ing] to hire us to perform the port properly for them or to actively maintain the security of the kernel they're providing to their paid customers" isn't ripping off the developers or stealing from artisans. Nor is "not contribut[ing] a single dime toward our continued development and maintenance." None of those things are required by the GPL. If you want to sell software, and if you want to get pissed when people use your software without paying you for it, choose a license that requires people to pay you for your software. (And exactly how much money has GRsecurity paid to the developers of the kernel they're patching? The unmitigated gall factor here is stronger than most of these kinds of rants that I've seen, because they're not even the upstream.)

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago

FUCK EVERYONE.

armitron 11y ago

Ah Spender. Always the drama queen. The real problem here is not companies abusing the GPL (good luck with that), but grsecurity not being integrated with mainline after more than a decade. You see, if Spender really cared about security he would work with the kernel developers in order to get grsecurity into the kernel but of course being such a famewhore, he never did that. Everything is fine as long as he is the center of attention, actual security be damned. Spender: I among many have little sympathy for you, you've long exhausted our patience with your antics. Grsecurity is a niche project with minimal actual security impact in the "real world", all because of the deranged way you choose to manage it. Your primary concern, your _ONLY_ concern should be getting grsecurity into the kernel, not companies ripping you off, not companies abusing your trademark, not companies "not playing nice". In the grand scheme of things, these are irrelevant.

dewyatt 11y ago
Do you mean Spengler, perhaps?
- adamzochowski 11y ago
  I think "spendy" is his irc nick. And "spender" is his grsec machine nick https://www.grsecurity.net/~spender/ https://www.grsecurity.net/~spender/
csirac2 11y ago
I can appreciate that it's been a bit like that, but isn't the truth really somewhere in between? Oversized egos are a problem at the best of times in open source, especially in the kernel. Which has traditionally had a culture of casual indifference toward the security priorities of PaX/grsec, and some would say toward security generally (I don't buy that - there's a lot of concern for integrity in the kernel, and that at least buys you some security). Whilst it would have been great if Spender could have completely changed his personality, outlook and perspective on the world so that he could commandeer the linux kernel from the outside-in toward his vision of a safer kernel, is that really compatible with the wider project? And so, it's equally depressing there hasn't been more recruitment from the kernel side - the side that actually has resources - to figure out a path toward getting PaX stuff mainlined from the inside-out. I guess my point is: grsec has one focus, one priority. But the Linux kernel is a project that has a much more vast, broader scope of competing priorities to untangle, and I just can't see that such an enormous, busy and byzantine project ecosystem truly will ever see a clear mandate to get something as disruptive and single-minded as grsec mainlined. Not only would Spender have to become a different person, but the core kernel teams as well. In any case, I've reduced my patreon donations and put what little that is towards grsecurity. It's certainly that important and useful to me.

Asbostos 11y ago

It's not clear to me that he has any case at all with the trademark. You don't get to dictate how everyone uses your trademark. Some uses are acceptable without permission: "Usually it is permissible to use another person’s or company’s trademark or service mark when referring to a product or service of that person or company, provided it is clear that the mark is being used truthfully to refer to that specific product or service. It may not be used in a way that might mislead others as to that person’s or company’s affiliation with, sponsorship of or endorsement of your company or its products or services—for example, using a logo instead of simply the word form of the mark, or using the mark more prominently or frequently than necessary." [1] This appears to be how Wind River is using it. [1] http://www.inta.org/TrademarkBasics/FactSheets/Pages/TrademarkUseFactSheet.aspx http://www.inta.org/TrademarkBasics/FactSheets/Pages/Tradema...

randx838 11y ago
Agreed. I could see this being possible with a pre-existing trademark policy, and an explicitly different trademark for "test quality" code, and being very careful about it all, but otherwise I just don't see it. Trademark is to correctly identify the source of a good, and the source here is identified correctly. If it was creative commons licensed, they would be required to do what they have done. Not only all that, it seems like this is a bit strange that their complaint is that they called it grsecurity without using a blessed version, so their response is to stop giving out blessed versions publicly. Won't that just encourage more companies to do exactly what they are complaining about?
- davorak 11y ago
  > Won't that just encourage more companies to do exactly what they are complaining about? It will become much harder for any company to argue the they are using grsecurity if they are not a sponsor since it is not public disseminated any more. This should give their lawyers considerable more leverage and the offending company's lawyers are more likely to warn discourage stone walling the grsecurity team since the company will be in a weaker position.
  - 11y ago

bmir-alum-007 11y ago

Most, but not all, companies generally don't donate any money to server OSes and open source they deploy by the hundreds of thousands. It sucks but it's the current state of affairs. (I think more FOSS should be be less free and monetized more in the context of large-scale enterprise purposes, in order to keep developers' bills paid and support quality up. The honor system doesn't work because most corporate choose to "cheat" where possible.) If a project releases open source totally for free, it cannot realistically expect sponsorship to magically appear. If a project needs sponsorship to keep the lights on, the we're closing up shop, unless ... routine works. If a project prefers to become a commercial product with a freemium option, they should do such. Otherwise, don't slave away on a project and resent what you cannot afford to give away. Just don't do it, if you can't live with it being exploited by companies for free. Punishing everyone for the sin of a few rogue companies is the kindergarteners routine and childish. It doesn't work and it just angers people without solving the licensing issue at a core level. PS: Perhaps grsecurity may want to instead consider a sensible noncommercial license similar to somewhere between AGPL and something like what good ol' evil Oracle would license their DBMS, i.e., companies over X employees or Y revenue need a license; hobbyists, academics and individual developers exempted. Drama resolved.

geofft 11y ago
> PS: Perhaps grsecurity may want to instead consider a sensible noncommercial license similar to somewhere between AGPL and something like what good ol' evil Oracle would license their DBMS, i.e., companies over X employees or Y revenue need a license; hobbyists, academics and individual developers exempted. Drama resolved. Being a set of Linux patches, it would be hard for them not to make their code available under GPLv2. They can do the Red Hat thing of making code available only to paying customers, and terminating their customers' accounts if they redistribute things publicly. They mention that in the post.
stevejones 11y ago
This isn't about money, this is about abuse of the trademark.

dfc 11y ago

There are a lot of people complaining about a future w/o grsecurity and I share your feelings. However I was surprised to see that nobody has mentioned that you and I can also donate to the project. Yes, it sucks that MegaCorp and InnoTrode are not compensating Grsecurity for the work. Its probably just as shitty that I have used grsecurity for as long as I have and just got around to donating to the project. If you use grsecurity and don't want to see it disappear go donate. Grsecurity accepts paypal/bitcoin/dwolla: https://grsecurity.net/contribute.php https://grsecurity.net/contribute.php