The thing is, it's actually not clear whether the intention here might actually harm the GPL. Effectively, programmers aren't lawyers so is marking something as

The thing is, it's actually not clear whether the intention here might actually harm the GPL. Effectively, programmers aren't lawyers so is marking something as EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL considered to be a legal restriction? And does that actually imply that EXPORT_SYMBOL is not considered a derived work? The problem is that "derived work" is something that needs to be handled on a case-by-case basis -- if you had a module that scanned the kernel's address space to violate the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL restriction, would that module have to be under the GPL (the answer is yes IMO, even though it didn't use any EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL APIs). This was brought up in a (very long) ML thread on LKML[1]. [1]: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/2016-August/003542.html https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/...