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the Libre Software community understands this, which is one of the reasons we push for the Use of Copy-Left licenses, and not Permissive licenses. So something
by syshum 7y ago
the Libre Software community understands this, which is one of the reasons we push for the Use of Copy-Left licenses, and not Permissive licenses.
So something like what happened here is not even possible. If the FUSE project on OSX would have been GPL from the beginning this person would not be able to change the licensing since he originally forked it, unless he rewrote all of the GPL code in a clean room rewrite which is not really realistic
- chinesempire 7y agoIf it was GPL from the beginning, wouldn't it be a "ZFS on Linux" like situation? I don't think you can legally distribute GPL kernel modules for non GPL kernels. Even if you linked the module to the Darwin code, which is released under an OSS license (APSL), the two are not compatible and it's not clear if redistribution is fine (see "Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux")
- trasz 7y agoSure you can. FreeBSD has been doing it for ages.
- chinesempire 7y agoFreeBSD has a license compatible with GPL. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD MacOS XNU doesn't. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apsl2 https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apsl2
- trasz 7y agoAnd how’s that relevant? Another example would be the closed source VMWare ESX, which is definitely not GPL-compatible.
- chinesempire 7y agoIt is relevant because you can't legally distribute GPL code linked to non-gpl compatible code. In fact VMWare and FSF/SFC have been fighting over it for the past 10 years. Even though the court dismissed the claim, VMWare announced that will remove the code in question (https://www.vmware.com/company/news/updates/march-2019-hellwig-legal-proceedings.html https://www.vmware.com/company/news/updates/march-2019-hellw...) You can read more about it here https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/03/09/0423243/vmware-touts-dismissal-of-linux-gpl-lawsuit https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/03/09/0423243/vmware-tou... In fact VMWare realese the source code of their drivers (among the other things) because they are licensed under the GPL https://www.vmware.com/download/open_source.html https://www.vmware.com/download/open_source.html And maintains the repositories on Github with much of the GPL code they use https://github.com/vmware https://github.com/vmware
- trasz 7y agoErm, from the links you've pasted it clearly follows that you can - that's what the court decided, twice, isn't it?
- chinesempire 7y agoActually the court did not decide that. They disagreed that vmkernel is a driver, they did not rule that GPLv2 software can be combined with incompatible licenses. The source code for vmklinux, The actual kernel module, is released by VMWare for this exact reason.