I kind of thought that always meant to be used a flag for "this user loaded some random binary in the kernel and now complains there is bug ". So developers loo

I kind of thought that always meant to be used a flag for "this user loaded some random binary in the kernel and now complains there is bug ". So developers look at the debug output and see "oh, well, it is tained, so, we won't waste time on this, you are on your own" kind of stuff. Which is reasonable. I think it's useful to look at it as that if the kernel is flagged as tainted, it means it's in a state that can't be properly debugged, independent of the exact reason. This could be because there's a opaque blob loaded that makes debugging difficult, if not impossible. It could also be because the license of the code that was loaded (even if it isn't an opaque blob) means that even if someone did figure out the problem, they couldn't necessarily get their changes committed upstream (or might have a hard time of it) and then they'd have wasted that time debugging something that legally can't be debugged by anyone or anyone can't use the results of the debugging (the fix), which are freedoms the GPL is designed to protect. There's a lot of bugs to work on, and it's meaningful to consider code that is licensed in a way that is not strictly GPL compatible as lower priority than code that is GPL.