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Linux's GPLv2 licence is routinely violated (2015)

161 points by ladyanita22 5y ago

btdmaster 5y ago
This is no cure, but quite a few kernel developers have signed this: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.16/process/kernel-enforcement-statement.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.16/process/kernel-enforce...
- jka 5y ago
  "We want companies and individuals to use, modify and distribute this software. We want to work with users in an open and transparent way to eliminate any uncertainty about our expectations regarding compliance or enforcement that might limit adoption of our software. We view legal action as a last resort, to be initiated only when other community efforts have failed to resolve the problem. Finally, once a non-compliance issue is resolved, we hope the user will feel welcome to join us in our efforts on this project. Working together, we will be stronger." A strong, collaborative stance - good stuff.
boomboomsubban 5y ago
*2015
- ladyanita22 5y ago
  Is it any less relevant?
  - dang 5y ago
    It's just the convention on HN to put the year in the title when it's an older story. Users often point it out as a hint to whoever can add it to the title. No criticism is implied!
    - ladyanita22 5y ago
      My bad! I wasn't aware of such a convention. Good to know!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 5y ago
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rosenjcb 5y ago
I agree: neither Linus nor FSF have authority to interpret the GPL. The way you find out if a license is enforceable is if you take it to arbitration or court. There's not enough case law in this area to smooth out our understanding of what is and isn't allowed.
charcircuit 5y ago
I used to use the GPL license to license my software, but now it seems like it is too much of a legal nightmare, so I've stopped using it.
- yardstick 5y ago
  What did you switch to?
- nix23 5y ago
  GPL is a nice idea...but you need lawyers lots of money and time. I hate lawyers and i don't have time for that bs nor do it have/want money to spend for lawyers, i was a diehard gpl evangelist in my 20`s, now it's BSD/MIT/ISC (and not diehard anymore...more like IDGAS)...and i really don't care for religion anymore...just quality and real freedom.
  - tssge 5y ago
    >GPL is a nice idea...but you need lawyers lots of money and time. This applies to any license. BSD/MIT/ISC rules can be broken as well and the only means to rectify it in the case that the other party refuses to cooperate is to resort to litigation.
    - nix23 5y ago
      >BSD/MIT/ISC rules can be broken as well No one cares and no one has interests to break them for financial gain...not even lawyers (that's the good part)
      - pabs3 5y ago
        My router violates the BSD license and they got financial gain from that.
        charcircuit 5y ago
        That was probably done because of laziness or incompetence and not for financial gain. The financial loss of attributing someone is very tiny compared to having to release all of your source.
robertlagrant 5y ago
Never mind a clean room interpretation; if we can get one project to wrap the ABI and everyone build against that project then there's only project that can be sued :-)
phendrenad2 5y ago
Good writeup on the intricacies and consequences of the Linux kernel being GPLv2 licensed. The actual headline is debatable. However, It seems to me that the license doesn't matter that much, since everyone has a vested interest in Linux being exactly the way it is, GPL_ONLY weirdness and all. It's unlikely that someone will show up and fork Linux and explicitly break the license (using GPL_ONLY symbols in a non-GPL context), because that person or company would be excommunicated from the Linux fold.
- ladyanita22 5y ago
  How feasible is it to avoid using GPL_ONLY symbols? Because if you for sure need GPL modules for some use cases[1], then I believe the point still stands. [1] This is, being unable to even reimplement the functions yourself in a self-contained module.
  - johnny22 5y ago
    both zfs and nvidia do it, don't they? Or at least they haven't been in trouble over it :)
    - asveikau 5y ago
      Wasn't there a module in the early 2000s that set its license to something like: "GPL\0 with the following exceptions ..." So when the kernel pieces that enforced GPL_ONLY did a strcmp on the license, it came up as GPL. I forget who it was who tried that. This came up in a Google search: https://lwn.net/Articles/220349/ https://lwn.net/Articles/220349/ https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/10/27/233 https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/10/27/233 https://lwn.net/Articles/118269/ https://lwn.net/Articles/118269/
    - phendrenad2 5y ago
      zfs and nvidia work around it by requiring user intervention to apply the patch. Once the kernel is tainted by zfs or nvidia code, the user can't share it without violating the GPL (IANAL but that's my understanding). In the era of always-on internet connections, this is a feasible solution, except it's the kernel, so perhaps ethernet and wifi drivers might have a bit of a catch-22 using this method :)
hayleox 5y ago
While it's not ideal to have Linux being used in ways that aren't permitted by the license, it's not necessarily a violation of anyone's rights. These license-incompatible uses of Linux are ongoing and readily apparent. There's a decent argument to be made that anyone contributing to Linux should have reasonably expected that their contributions would be used in this way, even if it wasn't in the license. Courts have to deal with resolving disputes where the terms of agreement weren't clearly documented all the time. Obviously that's a bit flimsy and it'd be preferable that the license be bulletproof, but it is what it is. It only becomes a problem if someone gets litigious. If that happens, and it's someone who's made a small contribution, then their code can probably just be purged and rewritten. If it happens with a bigger contributor, then the argument that they should have known what was going on becomes stronger. Hopefully it never becomes an issue. /shrug
- ladyanita22 5y ago
  The problem (for me) is that nowadays most of our IT infrastructure depends on Linux. Depending on an operating system hoping that nobody ever gets litigious because it's licensed in such a way that it creates this risk is, for me, a bit problematic.
  - coliveira 5y ago
    This has always been the case. Most operating systems are based on UNIX technology and SCO once tried to sue almost everyone based on that. These things don't happen often in practice because big companies want to support customers, not to sue them. And in case someone like SCO appears, big companies have deep pockets to make agreements with them.
ladyanita22 5y ago
I believe there may be some reasons why you may want proprietary (or incompatibly licensed) kernel modules. In such cases, as long as you didn't take code from the Kernel, I believe it shouldn't be considered a derivative work. I believe my opinion is quite unpopular and not share within the FOSS community. I honestly speaking prefer BSD or MIT for the linking purposes. I believe forbidding linking makes it too restrictive for some use cases. Particularly striking to me is this sentence: "It is rather ironic that in some ways, one has more freedom in how one licences a kernel driver for Windows than the freedom one supposedly has in writing a kernel module for Linux. " It makes me believe there's something wrong in the current state of things.
- RustyRussell 5y ago
  Sure, but when I was a kernel dev I considered it a reasonable line: it's not that hard to create your own kernel if you want a different licence. It was one reason I worked on the kernel: that all your software should be hackable. I probably would have found something else to do if the licence were different.
- fao_ 5y ago
  > I believe it shouldn't be considered a derivative work Isn't the point of the majority of this document, that nobody, not individual rightsholders, nor the FSF, not even the Linux Kernel Project, has the legal authority or knowledge to interpret the LGPLv2. That fundamentally the LGPLv2 is a legal document and therefore the only people able to create an interpretation of this document are lawyers, and even then, their interpretation is subject to how a judge might decide in a court of law? So therefore, your beliefs, my beliefs, anyone's beliefs on this are mere conjecture or supposition, and can be considered essentially worthless. Ultimately, how it plays out depends on legal precedence, jurisdiction, judge, hell- the weather on the day of the trial and the specific circumstances in which it is brought up in the court system. Ergo, isn't it more than a little presumptuous to debate on this matter? To put forth your opinion and opine it as what you believe, and therefore as some degree of possibility or fact, despite there being essentially no reference point unless a lawyer was actually contacted and was able to provide an interpretation?
torstenvl 5y ago
> Linus Torvalds seems to speak as though he has the power to interpret the GPL. IANAIPL but intent of the parties does generally matter to any legal analysis of an agreement. This is especially true when discussing written evidence of intent. Arguably, the discussion of GPL_ONLY could be taken to mean that those without such a marking are being granted an exception by the authors, which is perfectly well within their power to do. https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/the-parol-evidence-rule/ https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/the-parol-evidence-rul...
- mustache_kimono 5y ago
  But parole evidence is trickier to apply here than you might imagine. It only applies where there is an ambiguity in the text, and probably matters much less where 3rd parties are to be bound by a license, instead of two parties to a contract. Imagine, say, Microsoft (bogeyman) explaining what we really meant is that "Licensees shall give us their first born child."
fsckboy 5y ago
>It is rather ironic that in some ways, one has more freedom in how one licences a kernel driver for Windows than the freedom one supposedly has in writing a kernel module for Linux. it is not ironic at all: freedom in Free Software is the freedom of USERS of the software to be able to see and modify the source. This is a freedom granted by the writers of the software, and copyleft means that this right is ensured through any chain of modifications by additional authors. In this same way, the GPL and like licenses are the most permissive licenses from the perspective of every eventual user
- aaomidi 5y ago
  Yeah this is not a "no license" freedom situation. People routinely get this wrong.
  - convolvatron 5y ago
    well, you have to admit its a little confusing. its so free, that by accepting it, I can constraint your future behavior (making it less free really), so that other people have the same freedom with respect to your contributions (being constrained) as you did
    - aaomidi 5y ago
      Because freedom is defined for the thing being licensed, it's not a human centric freedom of "I can do what I want with it." It's from the perspective of, for example, the Software saying "I'm always free and never beholden to someone else's whims."
    - noizejoy 5y ago
      I have to admit, that I have higher expectations of people understanding licensing subtleties when they create software for distribution.
    - jcelerier 5y ago
      The philosophical stance of GPL is freedom at the individual human level - the only thing that actually matters if you are part of mankind. Yes, a society where you cannot "choose" to be enslaved is semantically less free than one where you can, but hopefully everyone agrees that for definitions of "freedom" which matter for human beings, the first society is a better choice.
tsimionescu 5y ago
> The userspace ABI is stable and intended not to cause anything targeting it to become a derived work. But once again, this seems to be a way in which the kernel project seems to think it has the power to interpret the GPL. In their minds, targeting the userspace ABI doesn't make a derived work, but writing a module does, unless it only targets GPL_ONLY symbols, in which case for some reason it isn't. I think this whole part applies as much to the text of the GPL itself as to the common Linux explanation. The GPL draws a distinction between dynamic linking, static linking, and use over a network or through a CLI style interface to decide if a work is a derived work of the GPL program. But, this distinction is just a novel legal theory proposal at best - there is nothing in copyright law that would make the GPL distinctions authoritative. A license simply doesn't get to decide what constitutes a derived work - that's entirely up to copyright law itself and the court system to decide. On the other hand, unless and until Congress decides to explicitly legislate how copyright should apply to software, the courts can very well take common industry practice into consideration for judging what is and is not a derived work of a program, and in this sense the Linux kernel developers' opinion is in no way less impactful than the proposals in the GPL itself. Furthermore, in a matter of contract law (so assuming that the work is indeed judged to be derived according to copyright law, but now judging whether the GPL may offer some relevant exemptions), the stated intentions and interpretations of the parties of the contract are indeed relevant. If there is a long history of kernel developers publicly stating that as long as you are not using GPL_ONLY symbols, your work should not be considered to be under the purview of the GPL, and if this has not been commonly publicly contested, I think that in an actual trial this will matter much more than other interpretations of the GPL.
- temac 5y ago
  > I think this whole part applies as much to the text of the GPL itself as to the common Linux explanation. The GPL draws a distinction between dynamic linking, static linking, and use over a network or through a CLI style interface to decide if a work is a derived work of the GPL program. I just rechecked and it does not seem the GPLv2 does such things. I've not rechecked for v3, but from memory it does not do that either. I completely agree with you that clear intent is important though.
AshamedCaptain 5y ago
> Actually, it gets worse. Here's what the GPLv2 says about termination: > So if you violate the licence, it is terminated. That's it. Given that “you” may refer to a corporation, this creates the following disturbing possibility: This is called the GPL death penalty, has actually happen in the past even before the article was written. It is yet another thing fixed by the oft-maligned GPLv3. Samba switched to GPLv3 because of it. https://ftp.samba.org/pub/samba/slides/linuxcollab-why-samba-went-gplv3.pdf https://ftp.samba.org/pub/samba/slides/linuxcollab-why-samba...
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  Now I'm curious. Who or what company was hit by the GPL "death penalty"?
  - lolinder 5y ago
    Last year Stockfish attempted to enforce the GPLv3 version of the clause against ChessBase. I'm not sure how it has turned out so far. https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/our-lawsuit-against-chessbase/ https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/our-lawsuit-against-che... Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896386
  - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
    The slides I attached are from a talk which mentioned one example. I remember seeing some version of this talk at some FOSDEM, likely https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/samba/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/samba/
- hda111 5y ago
  GPLv3 isn’t a useful license because it makes the use of software in automotive devices effectively impossible. And I think this is a security issue as well because the vendors still rely on very old GPLv2 versions of software and can’t update even if they wanted to.
  - deleted 5y ago
Comevius 5y ago
I rather use Mozilla Public License 2.0, Eclipse Public License 2.0, or EUPL 1.2 for copyleft purposes. Strong copyleft as a concept has no legal reality. Linking a program to another don't produce a derivative work. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/why-viral-licensing-ghost https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/why-viral-l... FSF is full of baloney about how static or dynamic linking is different than communicating for example through sockets. To be able to use the program I have to link it. What manner I choose to do that or available to me should not matter. I should also be able to reproduce portions of a program necessary for linking. Interoperability does not interfere with the legitimate interest of the licensor, or conflict with normal usage.
- ladyanita22 5y ago
  That'd be more akin to the Apple Public License, right?
- mustache_kimono 5y ago
  I wish the FOSS community would rally around this idea. Re: GNU/FSF, I think they've done a real disservice to the FOSS community misrepresenting the state of American copyright law. I wish someone with credibility with devs/FOSS users would finally say: "This is such an illusion, it's mostly a joke."
  - zokula 5y ago
- rileymat2 5y ago
  There is a major distinction between static and dynamic linking, with dynamic linking you are releasing the work as is, with static linking and various optimizations you are clearly creating a derivative work. It is the difference between a book citing another, and pasting large portions in. Tldr; I see a distinction but probably disagree with fsf on dynamic linking.
- admax88qqq 5y ago
  What? The FSF and copyright in general does not worry about static vs dynamic linking. They focus on "derivative works.". The only question that matters is "does this piece of software derive from this other piece.". How they are linked together has no meaning. Hackers like to misunderstand that and think they can work around the GPL by how they bundle the two pieces together. The CLISP case is a classic example. It bundled and dynamically linked readline, and as a result it got a significantly better command line interface. The author argued that this didn't make it a derivative works and didn't need to licence his code as GPL as a result. But that violated the terms of readline, which plainly says if you want to use readline to provide a powerful command line interface then you have to license your code as GPL. You can always opt not to use the useful libraries and code that exist as GPL, but you can't take your cake and eat it too.
crazypython 5y ago
> So if you violate the licence, it is terminated. That's it. Given that “you” may refer to a corporation, this creates the following disturbing possibility: GPLv3 fixed this, after being notified of a violation, you have 30 days to remedy it
kmeisthax 5y ago
Several of the points in this article are either flat-out wrong, or are correct but being read in the wrong context. > The licence is specifically GPLv2 and not “GPLv2 or later”, which is the default when applying the GPLv2 to software. Because Linus didn't and doesn't want the FSF relicensing Linux with new restrictions to fit their specific political goals[0], on the basis that adding any further restrictions to GPL violates the spirit of the GPL. He's not opposed to using v3 software, he just doesn't like upgrade clauses on Linux. > Linus Torvalds seems to speak as though he has the power to interpret the GPL. He does not; nor does the FSF. Linus is a copyright holder. So is the FSF. While a judge would ultimately be interpreting the GPL in an enforcement case, the words of the copyright holder have significant weight when interpreting a license. So, if you write LKMs that infringe the GPL, the court will listen to Linus to determine where the boundary is. Likewise if you wrote infringing GPL plugins the court would listen to the FSF. > Supposedly, the requirements of the GPLv2 do not apply to the userspace ABI. Yes, because Linus said so. This isn't even an implied license thing; Linux has always had an explicit exception for the ABI. It is actually an open question whether or not bundling an application with some GPL host program trips the GPL copyleft. The word "program" in the GPL is strategically vague here; it does not correspond to an address space. Two or more processes with IPC could be considered to be one program[1]. Related note: emulator developers writing GPLv2 or v3 emulators should seriously consider clarifying that bundling a game with an emulator doesn't make the game itself part of the same program as the emulator. > Conversely, the Linux kernel project claims that the GPLv2 conditions do apply to the kernel-mode ABI. No, quite the opposite. The Linux kernel project has claimed that kernel-mode symbols equivalent to the userspace ABI do not trip the GPL copyleft. That's why they have the GPL_ONLY DRM[2]; it's to distinguish between "running two programs in the same address space" and "merging a module into the same GPL program". > If modules are derived works, then every non-GPL non-cleanroomed module is violating the GPLv2. This creates a ticking time bomb for companies which rely on this ability, because they could get sued by any contributor at any time. > If modules are not derived works, the “GPL_ONLY” provision is meaningless and unenforceable. Well, first off... clean room is not a legal requirement, it's a defense against the access prong of substantial similarity in an infringement lawsuit. This would apply if you were writing your own kernel that can run Linux programs[3] - you would need to defend against claims that you just copied Linux instead of writing a workalike. Loadable kernel modules are not workalikes; they are additional programs that can modify how the Linux kernel works. To the extent that a loadable module modifies the original program or incorporates it into itself, it can be considered to be a derivative work. But since the userspace ABI has been explicitly opted out of the GPL copyleft, those modules can still use it. GPL_ONLY exists purely to technically enforce what Linus believes the license on Linux is. >It is rather ironic that in some ways, one has more freedom in how one licences a kernel driver for Windows than the freedom one supposedly has in writing a kernel module for Linux. (...) Under such a model of copyright, the IBM PC could never have been reverse engineered and cloned, and the computer on which I am typing this would not exist. Oh boy. You're allowed to write kernel drivers for Windows because Microsoft explicitly said that you could. Linus does the same thing with GPL_ONLY. I'm pretty sure the NT kernel has it's own internal symbols you're not allowed to link with, and Microsoft could allege in court that doing so creates an infringing derivative work. The confusion doesn't come from the GPL, it comes from copyright law. This, again, has nothing to do with cloning; Compaq didn't need to ship code that links with the IBM PC BIOS. They needed to ship code that replaced it entirely. There is a difference between replacing a program and linking with it. The article also alleges that a single Linux contributor could pull an SCO and sue every company that's ever written non-GPL kernel code. I don't think that would actually work, because the userspace ABI exception that spawns all this is part of the license that the contributor implicitly agreed to when they modified Linux and sent that code upstream. Furthermore, every contributor is downstream of precisely one copyright holder: Linus Torvalds. If you don't have a license from Linus to modify Linux, then you own nothing and cannot sue. So you're arguing that Linus gave you permission to modify and sublicense under specific rules he selected, but that he's not allowed to interpret those rules at all because you made a small part of Linux? That's probably not going to fly in court. [0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/9/25/161 https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/9/25/161 Also, related note: at one point the FSF was seriously mulling rolling AGPL into GPLv3, which is insane. [1] Most browsers are structured as IPC process networks nowadays, and contain loads of permissively licensed, LGPL, and proprietary code all mixed together. If GPL "programs" were just address spaces, then they could spawn GPL code in a subprocess to evade the copyleft. [2] Digital Rights Management, not Direct Rendering Manager. [3] Examples of such programs would include iSH and Windows Subsystem for Linux (version 1; v2 actually runs the Linux kernel).
ramshorns 5y ago
Linux is licensed under GPLv2 with an additional permission (or exception): > NOTE! This copyright does not cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does not fall under the heading of "derived work". All the contributors license their work under this license with this additional permission. So in that sense it's not really Linus interpreting the GPL, and I don't think there's a risk of a contributor revoking this permission. But maybe this doesn't apply to kernel modules and doesn't address the GPL_ONLY symbols thing.
- butlerm 5y ago
  There are actually two possibilities here: (1) The text of the GPLv2 does legitimately restrict user programs as derivative works of the kernel, and therefore a license exception is needed from the licensors in order avoid violating the license or copyright law. (2) User programs are not legitimately derivative works of the kernel, and therefore a license exception is not required, and anything said on the subject is mere commentary about the prevailing legal state of affairs. In my opinion, the idea that user programs are - in general - derivative works of the kernel is nonsense, but for people who worry that they are or might be, the clarification or exception (whichever) is quite convenient. A court is not going to enforce a requirement on the licensees that the licensors and copyright holders explicitly deny and disavow, no matter what any third party thinks about the subject. The situation with in kernel modules is more complicated, because there the licensor copyright holders appear to be convinced that nearly any kernel module is legitimately classified as a derivative work, so estoppel doesn't apply and whether a kernel module is actually a derivative work depends such things as how much kernel inline code was included in the compilation process, if not other apparent legal nonsense like compatibility and purpose which appears to have no basis in copyright law as something that in and of itself makes for a derivative work at all.
meinersbur 5y ago
> The userspace ABI is stable and intended not to cause anything targeting it to become a derived work. > the only thing forcing modules to be GPLv2-compatible is the rate of change of the kernel mode ABI making it impractical to target it via cleanroom methods. What is licensed is a specific source code version, not the history of previous versions. For a specific revision, there is no meaning to "more stable". What makes userspace programs non-derived work is the syscall exception: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/LICENSES/exceptions/Linux-syscall-note https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/LICENSES/excep...
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> What makes userspace programs non-derived work is the syscall exception And with the Google vs Oracle decision we know that APIs are not copyrightable anyway. If I can clone an API and create my own implementation then surely someone else can write programs that use my cloned implementation or the original.
chriscappuccio 5y ago
by using copyright law as an enforcement mechanism, these licenses make terms which govern behavior controlled by users -- terms which are practically unenforceable this article is a ridiculous charade, starting out saying that people like Linus don't have the power to interpret the GPL then he goes on for many paragraphs with a more outlandish interpretation of the GPL than i've seen in a long time.
josephcsible 5y ago
> You have use cases for binary kernel modules which need to be accommodated I can't think of a single reason that binary-only kernel modules would ever need to be distributed. There are some cases when out-of-tree modules make sense, but in all of these cases, they could be distributed with source code, in compliance with the GPL.
- jeremyjh 5y ago
  Ok then we just won't use Nvidia cards with Linux.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    My point is that there's no reason that Nvidia can't release the source code of their Linux drivers. They just choose not to.
    - phendrenad2 5y ago
      If there's no reason, why would they choose not to? The simplest explanation is that there's some reason they choose not to.
snickerbockers 5y ago
Is there any legal significance to "clean-room" reverse-engineering? I hear this term a lot from engineers who seem to think that they're entitled to claim ownership over distinct works created by people who read their source code (and in extreme cases their documentation or even disassembled binaries), but that's not how any other form of intellectual property works.
- EMIRELADERO 5y ago
  Yes, there is significant legal precedent for the practice. Sony v. Connectix, Inc. comes to mind. Team A directly reversed Sony's PS1 BIOS and gave the resulting specifications to team B, which then implemented those in source code form.
  - snickerbockers 5y ago
    No, there's nothing about clean-room reverse-engineering in the sony v connectix decision. I suggest you read it.
- georgyo 5y ago
  IANAL This is the difference between patents and copyright. A mechanism that is patented can not be implemented by anyone. It doesn't matter if they did or did not read your source, they cannot implement it. It doesn't even matter if they knew the patent existed or that even that it had been done before. Copyright is a lot more forgiving. It only covers the exact implementation. Doing a clean room implemation means you will write different code that does the exact or very similar thing.
  - gonzo 5y ago
    That’s not how patents work.
  - coliveira 5y ago
    For patents, you can do your implementation, but you need to pay for the privilege.
snnn 5y ago
Firmware of TP-link routers is licensed under GPL. But would anyone of you get the source code? They say they provide machine-readable source code. I don't quite understand what it means.
- andreareina 5y ago
  I read that as minified/obfuscated. Which is not gpl compliant (not going to quote directly but there's language in there about having to provide the source in is preferred form for editing).
- yuubi 5y ago
  GPL 2 says "machine-readable", which I read as meaning on a tape or ftp site or something in a useful form, not handwritten on paper or similarly useless form. Also, I doubt obfuscated code would comply with the "preferred form" part.
- kuang_eleven 5y ago
  Like this page? https://www.tp-link.com/us/support/gpl-code/ https://www.tp-link.com/us/support/gpl-code/ It's not even slightly hidden, pretty easy to get the code.
pabs3 5y ago
I'm hoping Software Freedom Conservancy's Vizio lawsuit will enable Linux users to sue over Linux GPL violations and get compliance. Currently only Linux copyright holders can sue, but Conservancy believes that users are third-party beneficiaries of the GPL and thus should have standing to sue for GPL compliance. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
- jeremyjh 5y ago
  Did you even read the article?
phendrenad2 5y ago
Related reading: https://lwn.net/Articles/860262/ https://lwn.net/Articles/860262/ Key takeaway: > purveyors of proprietary modules have engaged in a number of tricks to get around GPL-only exports There are many technical workarounds possible still. You could scan the kernel binary for byte patterns and build your own export list. How will the kernel maintainers plug that hole? (Maybe they can implement compile-time binary obfuscation, and sacrifice performance to stop proprietary code, wouldn't that be funny?) I think that these efforts to prevent (what the kernel developers see as) "license infringement" through technical means sort of reveals that they don't really think that the line of reasoning would hold up in court.
eqvinox 5y ago
There is a difference between derivative works and composite works. Please learn it. (This specifically applies to the userspace boundary discussions in this article, but for modules it's not 100% clear-cut either.) I'm not going to try to explain it here because I'm not a lawyer and don't want to propagate what could be my flawed understanding. I do think I've understood it and that it matters here. There's probably a few good explainers from legally versed people out there on the WWW.
rob_c 5y ago
If this were taken to an extreme then nothing proprietary could run on this kernel. That is not the intent of the code authors in many cases and frankly the wording of GPLv2 being so vague here is as Linus has said part of it's strength. Given the very open context of how it's taken by the community the worst that will ever happen is the kernel eventually getting relicensed under GPLv2+Legal_Pedantry rather than nVidia or vmware being forced to open up their product codebases. Frankly this then gets even messier when considering copyright law, frankly given the weird status of an ABI/API in legal definitions this is the fault of the courts not the linux-kernel or the software devs...
SOF3 5y ago
Is GPL even significant nowadays other than annoying programmers? A lot of commercial software are provided as cloud services and GPL has no effect on them anyway. If you are really a fan of the viral nature of GPL, you should be using AGPL anyway.

161 points by ladyanita22 5y ago

This is no cure, but quite a few kernel developers have signed this: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.16/process/kernel-enforcement-statement.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.16/process/kernel-enforce...

jka 5y ago
"We want companies and individuals to use, modify and distribute this software. We want to work with users in an open and transparent way to eliminate any uncertainty about our expectations regarding compliance or enforcement that might limit adoption of our software. We view legal action as a last resort, to be initiated only when other community efforts have failed to resolve the problem. Finally, once a non-compliance issue is resolved, we hope the user will feel welcome to join us in our efforts on this project. Working together, we will be stronger." A strong, collaborative stance - good stuff.

boomboomsubban 5y ago

*2015

ladyanita22 5y ago
Is it any less relevant?
- dang 5y ago
  It's just the convention on HN to put the year in the title when it's an older story. Users often point it out as a hint to whoever can add it to the title. No criticism is implied!
  - ladyanita22 5y ago
    My bad! I wasn't aware of such a convention. Good to know!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 5y ago

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rosenjcb 5y ago

I agree: neither Linus nor FSF have authority to interpret the GPL. The way you find out if a license is enforceable is if you take it to arbitration or court. There's not enough case law in this area to smooth out our understanding of what is and isn't allowed.

charcircuit 5y ago

I used to use the GPL license to license my software, but now it seems like it is too much of a legal nightmare, so I've stopped using it.

yardstick 5y ago
What did you switch to?
nix23 5y ago
GPL is a nice idea...but you need lawyers lots of money and time. I hate lawyers and i don't have time for that bs nor do it have/want money to spend for lawyers, i was a diehard gpl evangelist in my 20`s, now it's BSD/MIT/ISC (and not diehard anymore...more like IDGAS)...and i really don't care for religion anymore...just quality and real freedom.
- tssge 5y ago
  >GPL is a nice idea...but you need lawyers lots of money and time. This applies to any license. BSD/MIT/ISC rules can be broken as well and the only means to rectify it in the case that the other party refuses to cooperate is to resort to litigation.
  - nix23 5y ago
    >BSD/MIT/ISC rules can be broken as well No one cares and no one has interests to break them for financial gain...not even lawyers (that's the good part)
    - pabs3 5y ago
      My router violates the BSD license and they got financial gain from that.
      - charcircuit 5y ago
        That was probably done because of laziness or incompetence and not for financial gain. The financial loss of attributing someone is very tiny compared to having to release all of your source.

robertlagrant 5y ago

Never mind a clean room interpretation; if we can get one project to wrap the ABI and everyone build against that project then there's only project that can be sued :-)

phendrenad2 5y ago

Good writeup on the intricacies and consequences of the Linux kernel being GPLv2 licensed. The actual headline is debatable. However, It seems to me that the license doesn't matter that much, since everyone has a vested interest in Linux being exactly the way it is, GPL_ONLY weirdness and all. It's unlikely that someone will show up and fork Linux and explicitly break the license (using GPL_ONLY symbols in a non-GPL context), because that person or company would be excommunicated from the Linux fold.

ladyanita22 5y ago
How feasible is it to avoid using GPL_ONLY symbols? Because if you for sure need GPL modules for some use cases[1], then I believe the point still stands. [1] This is, being unable to even reimplement the functions yourself in a self-contained module.
- johnny22 5y ago
  both zfs and nvidia do it, don't they? Or at least they haven't been in trouble over it :)
  - asveikau 5y ago
    Wasn't there a module in the early 2000s that set its license to something like: "GPL\0 with the following exceptions ..." So when the kernel pieces that enforced GPL_ONLY did a strcmp on the license, it came up as GPL. I forget who it was who tried that. This came up in a Google search: https://lwn.net/Articles/220349/ https://lwn.net/Articles/220349/ https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/10/27/233 https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/10/27/233 https://lwn.net/Articles/118269/ https://lwn.net/Articles/118269/
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    zfs and nvidia work around it by requiring user intervention to apply the patch. Once the kernel is tainted by zfs or nvidia code, the user can't share it without violating the GPL (IANAL but that's my understanding). In the era of always-on internet connections, this is a feasible solution, except it's the kernel, so perhaps ethernet and wifi drivers might have a bit of a catch-22 using this method :)

hayleox 5y ago

While it's not ideal to have Linux being used in ways that aren't permitted by the license, it's not necessarily a violation of anyone's rights. These license-incompatible uses of Linux are ongoing and readily apparent. There's a decent argument to be made that anyone contributing to Linux should have reasonably expected that their contributions would be used in this way, even if it wasn't in the license. Courts have to deal with resolving disputes where the terms of agreement weren't clearly documented all the time. Obviously that's a bit flimsy and it'd be preferable that the license be bulletproof, but it is what it is. It only becomes a problem if someone gets litigious. If that happens, and it's someone who's made a small contribution, then their code can probably just be purged and rewritten. If it happens with a bigger contributor, then the argument that they should have known what was going on becomes stronger. Hopefully it never becomes an issue. /shrug

ladyanita22 5y ago
The problem (for me) is that nowadays most of our IT infrastructure depends on Linux. Depending on an operating system hoping that nobody ever gets litigious because it's licensed in such a way that it creates this risk is, for me, a bit problematic.
- coliveira 5y ago
  This has always been the case. Most operating systems are based on UNIX technology and SCO once tried to sue almost everyone based on that. These things don't happen often in practice because big companies want to support customers, not to sue them. And in case someone like SCO appears, big companies have deep pockets to make agreements with them.

ladyanita22 5y ago

I believe there may be some reasons why you may want proprietary (or incompatibly licensed) kernel modules. In such cases, as long as you didn't take code from the Kernel, I believe it shouldn't be considered a derivative work. I believe my opinion is quite unpopular and not share within the FOSS community. I honestly speaking prefer BSD or MIT for the linking purposes. I believe forbidding linking makes it too restrictive for some use cases. Particularly striking to me is this sentence: "It is rather ironic that in some ways, one has more freedom in how one licences a kernel driver for Windows than the freedom one supposedly has in writing a kernel module for Linux. " It makes me believe there's something wrong in the current state of things.

RustyRussell 5y ago
Sure, but when I was a kernel dev I considered it a reasonable line: it's not that hard to create your own kernel if you want a different licence. It was one reason I worked on the kernel: that all your software should be hackable. I probably would have found something else to do if the licence were different.
fao_ 5y ago
> I believe it shouldn't be considered a derivative work Isn't the point of the majority of this document, that nobody, not individual rightsholders, nor the FSF, not even the Linux Kernel Project, has the legal authority or knowledge to interpret the LGPLv2. That fundamentally the LGPLv2 is a legal document and therefore the only people able to create an interpretation of this document are lawyers, and even then, their interpretation is subject to how a judge might decide in a court of law? So therefore, your beliefs, my beliefs, anyone's beliefs on this are mere conjecture or supposition, and can be considered essentially worthless. Ultimately, how it plays out depends on legal precedence, jurisdiction, judge, hell- the weather on the day of the trial and the specific circumstances in which it is brought up in the court system. Ergo, isn't it more than a little presumptuous to debate on this matter? To put forth your opinion and opine it as what you believe, and therefore as some degree of possibility or fact, despite there being essentially no reference point unless a lawyer was actually contacted and was able to provide an interpretation?

torstenvl 5y ago

> Linus Torvalds seems to speak as though he has the power to interpret the GPL. IANAIPL but intent of the parties does generally matter to any legal analysis of an agreement. This is especially true when discussing written evidence of intent. Arguably, the discussion of GPL_ONLY could be taken to mean that those without such a marking are being granted an exception by the authors, which is perfectly well within their power to do. https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/the-parol-evidence-rule/ https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/the-parol-evidence-rul...

mustache_kimono 5y ago
But parole evidence is trickier to apply here than you might imagine. It only applies where there is an ambiguity in the text, and probably matters much less where 3rd parties are to be bound by a license, instead of two parties to a contract. Imagine, say, Microsoft (bogeyman) explaining what we really meant is that "Licensees shall give us their first born child."

fsckboy 5y ago

>It is rather ironic that in some ways, one has more freedom in how one licences a kernel driver for Windows than the freedom one supposedly has in writing a kernel module for Linux. it is not ironic at all: freedom in Free Software is the freedom of USERS of the software to be able to see and modify the source. This is a freedom granted by the writers of the software, and copyleft means that this right is ensured through any chain of modifications by additional authors. In this same way, the GPL and like licenses are the most permissive licenses from the perspective of every eventual user

aaomidi 5y ago
Yeah this is not a "no license" freedom situation. People routinely get this wrong.
- convolvatron 5y ago
  well, you have to admit its a little confusing. its so free, that by accepting it, I can constraint your future behavior (making it less free really), so that other people have the same freedom with respect to your contributions (being constrained) as you did
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    Because freedom is defined for the thing being licensed, it's not a human centric freedom of "I can do what I want with it." It's from the perspective of, for example, the Software saying "I'm always free and never beholden to someone else's whims."
  - noizejoy 5y ago
    I have to admit, that I have higher expectations of people understanding licensing subtleties when they create software for distribution.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    The philosophical stance of GPL is freedom at the individual human level - the only thing that actually matters if you are part of mankind. Yes, a society where you cannot "choose" to be enslaved is semantically less free than one where you can, but hopefully everyone agrees that for definitions of "freedom" which matter for human beings, the first society is a better choice.

tsimionescu 5y ago

> The userspace ABI is stable and intended not to cause anything targeting it to become a derived work. But once again, this seems to be a way in which the kernel project seems to think it has the power to interpret the GPL. In their minds, targeting the userspace ABI doesn't make a derived work, but writing a module does, unless it only targets GPL_ONLY symbols, in which case for some reason it isn't. I think this whole part applies as much to the text of the GPL itself as to the common Linux explanation. The GPL draws a distinction between dynamic linking, static linking, and use over a network or through a CLI style interface to decide if a work is a derived work of the GPL program. But, this distinction is just a novel legal theory proposal at best - there is nothing in copyright law that would make the GPL distinctions authoritative. A license simply doesn't get to decide what constitutes a derived work - that's entirely up to copyright law itself and the court system to decide. On the other hand, unless and until Congress decides to explicitly legislate how copyright should apply to software, the courts can very well take common industry practice into consideration for judging what is and is not a derived work of a program, and in this sense the Linux kernel developers' opinion is in no way less impactful than the proposals in the GPL itself. Furthermore, in a matter of contract law (so assuming that the work is indeed judged to be derived according to copyright law, but now judging whether the GPL may offer some relevant exemptions), the stated intentions and interpretations of the parties of the contract are indeed relevant. If there is a long history of kernel developers publicly stating that as long as you are not using GPL_ONLY symbols, your work should not be considered to be under the purview of the GPL, and if this has not been commonly publicly contested, I think that in an actual trial this will matter much more than other interpretations of the GPL.

temac 5y ago
> I think this whole part applies as much to the text of the GPL itself as to the common Linux explanation. The GPL draws a distinction between dynamic linking, static linking, and use over a network or through a CLI style interface to decide if a work is a derived work of the GPL program. I just rechecked and it does not seem the GPLv2 does such things. I've not rechecked for v3, but from memory it does not do that either. I completely agree with you that clear intent is important though.

AshamedCaptain 5y ago

> Actually, it gets worse. Here's what the GPLv2 says about termination: > So if you violate the licence, it is terminated. That's it. Given that “you” may refer to a corporation, this creates the following disturbing possibility: This is called the GPL death penalty, has actually happen in the past even before the article was written. It is yet another thing fixed by the oft-maligned GPLv3. Samba switched to GPLv3 because of it. https://ftp.samba.org/pub/samba/slides/linuxcollab-why-samba-went-gplv3.pdf https://ftp.samba.org/pub/samba/slides/linuxcollab-why-samba...

phendrenad2 5y ago
Now I'm curious. Who or what company was hit by the GPL "death penalty"?
- lolinder 5y ago
  Last year Stockfish attempted to enforce the GPLv3 version of the clause against ChessBase. I'm not sure how it has turned out so far. https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/our-lawsuit-against-chessbase/ https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/our-lawsuit-against-che... Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896386
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  The slides I attached are from a talk which mentioned one example. I remember seeing some version of this talk at some FOSDEM, likely https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/samba/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/samba/
hda111 5y ago
GPLv3 isn’t a useful license because it makes the use of software in automotive devices effectively impossible. And I think this is a security issue as well because the vendors still rely on very old GPLv2 versions of software and can’t update even if they wanted to.
- deleted 5y ago

Comevius 5y ago

I rather use Mozilla Public License 2.0, Eclipse Public License 2.0, or EUPL 1.2 for copyleft purposes. Strong copyleft as a concept has no legal reality. Linking a program to another don't produce a derivative work. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/why-viral-licensing-ghost https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/why-viral-l... FSF is full of baloney about how static or dynamic linking is different than communicating for example through sockets. To be able to use the program I have to link it. What manner I choose to do that or available to me should not matter. I should also be able to reproduce portions of a program necessary for linking. Interoperability does not interfere with the legitimate interest of the licensor, or conflict with normal usage.

ladyanita22 5y ago
That'd be more akin to the Apple Public License, right?
mustache_kimono 5y ago
I wish the FOSS community would rally around this idea. Re: GNU/FSF, I think they've done a real disservice to the FOSS community misrepresenting the state of American copyright law. I wish someone with credibility with devs/FOSS users would finally say: "This is such an illusion, it's mostly a joke."
- zokula 5y ago
rileymat2 5y ago
There is a major distinction between static and dynamic linking, with dynamic linking you are releasing the work as is, with static linking and various optimizations you are clearly creating a derivative work. It is the difference between a book citing another, and pasting large portions in. Tldr; I see a distinction but probably disagree with fsf on dynamic linking.
admax88qqq 5y ago
What? The FSF and copyright in general does not worry about static vs dynamic linking. They focus on "derivative works.". The only question that matters is "does this piece of software derive from this other piece.". How they are linked together has no meaning. Hackers like to misunderstand that and think they can work around the GPL by how they bundle the two pieces together. The CLISP case is a classic example. It bundled and dynamically linked readline, and as a result it got a significantly better command line interface. The author argued that this didn't make it a derivative works and didn't need to licence his code as GPL as a result. But that violated the terms of readline, which plainly says if you want to use readline to provide a powerful command line interface then you have to license your code as GPL. You can always opt not to use the useful libraries and code that exist as GPL, but you can't take your cake and eat it too.

crazypython 5y ago

> So if you violate the licence, it is terminated. That's it. Given that “you” may refer to a corporation, this creates the following disturbing possibility: GPLv3 fixed this, after being notified of a violation, you have 30 days to remedy it

kmeisthax 5y ago

Several of the points in this article are either flat-out wrong, or are correct but being read in the wrong context. > The licence is specifically GPLv2 and not “GPLv2 or later”, which is the default when applying the GPLv2 to software. Because Linus didn't and doesn't want the FSF relicensing Linux with new restrictions to fit their specific political goals[0], on the basis that adding any further restrictions to GPL violates the spirit of the GPL. He's not opposed to using v3 software, he just doesn't like upgrade clauses on Linux. > Linus Torvalds seems to speak as though he has the power to interpret the GPL. He does not; nor does the FSF. Linus is a copyright holder. So is the FSF. While a judge would ultimately be interpreting the GPL in an enforcement case, the words of the copyright holder have significant weight when interpreting a license. So, if you write LKMs that infringe the GPL, the court will listen to Linus to determine where the boundary is. Likewise if you wrote infringing GPL plugins the court would listen to the FSF. > Supposedly, the requirements of the GPLv2 do not apply to the userspace ABI. Yes, because Linus said so. This isn't even an implied license thing; Linux has always had an explicit exception for the ABI. It is actually an open question whether or not bundling an application with some GPL host program trips the GPL copyleft. The word "program" in the GPL is strategically vague here; it does not correspond to an address space. Two or more processes with IPC could be considered to be one program[1]. Related note: emulator developers writing GPLv2 or v3 emulators should seriously consider clarifying that bundling a game with an emulator doesn't make the game itself part of the same program as the emulator. > Conversely, the Linux kernel project claims that the GPLv2 conditions do apply to the kernel-mode ABI. No, quite the opposite. The Linux kernel project has claimed that kernel-mode symbols equivalent to the userspace ABI do not trip the GPL copyleft. That's why they have the GPL_ONLY DRM[2]; it's to distinguish between "running two programs in the same address space" and "merging a module into the same GPL program". > If modules are derived works, then every non-GPL non-cleanroomed module is violating the GPLv2. This creates a ticking time bomb for companies which rely on this ability, because they could get sued by any contributor at any time. > If modules are not derived works, the “GPL_ONLY” provision is meaningless and unenforceable. Well, first off... clean room is not a legal requirement, it's a defense against the access prong of substantial similarity in an infringement lawsuit. This would apply if you were writing your own kernel that can run Linux programs[3] - you would need to defend against claims that you just copied Linux instead of writing a workalike. Loadable kernel modules are not workalikes; they are additional programs that can modify how the Linux kernel works. To the extent that a loadable module modifies the original program or incorporates it into itself, it can be considered to be a derivative work. But since the userspace ABI has been explicitly opted out of the GPL copyleft, those modules can still use it. GPL_ONLY exists purely to technically enforce what Linus believes the license on Linux is. >It is rather ironic that in some ways, one has more freedom in how one licences a kernel driver for Windows than the freedom one supposedly has in writing a kernel module for Linux. (...) Under such a model of copyright, the IBM PC could never have been reverse engineered and cloned, and the computer on which I am typing this would not exist. Oh boy. You're allowed to write kernel drivers for Windows because Microsoft explicitly said that you could. Linus does the same thing with GPL_ONLY. I'm pretty sure the NT kernel has it's own internal symbols you're not allowed to link with, and Microsoft could allege in court that doing so creates an infringing derivative work. The confusion doesn't come from the GPL, it comes from copyright law. This, again, has nothing to do with cloning; Compaq didn't need to ship code that links with the IBM PC BIOS. They needed to ship code that replaced it entirely. There is a difference between replacing a program and linking with it. The article also alleges that a single Linux contributor could pull an SCO and sue every company that's ever written non-GPL kernel code. I don't think that would actually work, because the userspace ABI exception that spawns all this is part of the license that the contributor implicitly agreed to when they modified Linux and sent that code upstream. Furthermore, every contributor is downstream of precisely one copyright holder: Linus Torvalds. If you don't have a license from Linus to modify Linux, then you own nothing and cannot sue. So you're arguing that Linus gave you permission to modify and sublicense under specific rules he selected, but that he's not allowed to interpret those rules at all because you made a small part of Linux? That's probably not going to fly in court. [0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/9/25/161 https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/9/25/161 Also, related note: at one point the FSF was seriously mulling rolling AGPL into GPLv3, which is insane. [1] Most browsers are structured as IPC process networks nowadays, and contain loads of permissively licensed, LGPL, and proprietary code all mixed together. If GPL "programs" were just address spaces, then they could spawn GPL code in a subprocess to evade the copyleft. [2] Digital Rights Management, not Direct Rendering Manager. [3] Examples of such programs would include iSH and Windows Subsystem for Linux (version 1; v2 actually runs the Linux kernel).

ramshorns 5y ago

Linux is licensed under GPLv2 with an additional permission (or exception): > NOTE! This copyright does not cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does not fall under the heading of "derived work". All the contributors license their work under this license with this additional permission. So in that sense it's not really Linus interpreting the GPL, and I don't think there's a risk of a contributor revoking this permission. But maybe this doesn't apply to kernel modules and doesn't address the GPL_ONLY symbols thing.

butlerm 5y ago
There are actually two possibilities here: (1) The text of the GPLv2 does legitimately restrict user programs as derivative works of the kernel, and therefore a license exception is needed from the licensors in order avoid violating the license or copyright law. (2) User programs are not legitimately derivative works of the kernel, and therefore a license exception is not required, and anything said on the subject is mere commentary about the prevailing legal state of affairs. In my opinion, the idea that user programs are - in general - derivative works of the kernel is nonsense, but for people who worry that they are or might be, the clarification or exception (whichever) is quite convenient. A court is not going to enforce a requirement on the licensees that the licensors and copyright holders explicitly deny and disavow, no matter what any third party thinks about the subject. The situation with in kernel modules is more complicated, because there the licensor copyright holders appear to be convinced that nearly any kernel module is legitimately classified as a derivative work, so estoppel doesn't apply and whether a kernel module is actually a derivative work depends such things as how much kernel inline code was included in the compilation process, if not other apparent legal nonsense like compatibility and purpose which appears to have no basis in copyright law as something that in and of itself makes for a derivative work at all.

meinersbur 5y ago

> The userspace ABI is stable and intended not to cause anything targeting it to become a derived work. > the only thing forcing modules to be GPLv2-compatible is the rate of change of the kernel mode ABI making it impractical to target it via cleanroom methods. What is licensed is a specific source code version, not the history of previous versions. For a specific revision, there is no meaning to "more stable". What makes userspace programs non-derived work is the syscall exception: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/LICENSES/exceptions/Linux-syscall-note https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/LICENSES/excep...

phkahler 5y ago
>> What makes userspace programs non-derived work is the syscall exception And with the Google vs Oracle decision we know that APIs are not copyrightable anyway. If I can clone an API and create my own implementation then surely someone else can write programs that use my cloned implementation or the original.

chriscappuccio 5y ago

by using copyright law as an enforcement mechanism, these licenses make terms which govern behavior controlled by users -- terms which are practically unenforceable this article is a ridiculous charade, starting out saying that people like Linus don't have the power to interpret the GPL then he goes on for many paragraphs with a more outlandish interpretation of the GPL than i've seen in a long time.

josephcsible 5y ago

> You have use cases for binary kernel modules which need to be accommodated I can't think of a single reason that binary-only kernel modules would ever need to be distributed. There are some cases when out-of-tree modules make sense, but in all of these cases, they could be distributed with source code, in compliance with the GPL.

jeremyjh 5y ago
Ok then we just won't use Nvidia cards with Linux.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  My point is that there's no reason that Nvidia can't release the source code of their Linux drivers. They just choose not to.
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    If there's no reason, why would they choose not to? The simplest explanation is that there's some reason they choose not to.

snickerbockers 5y ago

Is there any legal significance to "clean-room" reverse-engineering? I hear this term a lot from engineers who seem to think that they're entitled to claim ownership over distinct works created by people who read their source code (and in extreme cases their documentation or even disassembled binaries), but that's not how any other form of intellectual property works.

EMIRELADERO 5y ago
Yes, there is significant legal precedent for the practice. Sony v. Connectix, Inc. comes to mind. Team A directly reversed Sony's PS1 BIOS and gave the resulting specifications to team B, which then implemented those in source code form.
- snickerbockers 5y ago
  No, there's nothing about clean-room reverse-engineering in the sony v connectix decision. I suggest you read it.
georgyo 5y ago
IANAL This is the difference between patents and copyright. A mechanism that is patented can not be implemented by anyone. It doesn't matter if they did or did not read your source, they cannot implement it. It doesn't even matter if they knew the patent existed or that even that it had been done before. Copyright is a lot more forgiving. It only covers the exact implementation. Doing a clean room implemation means you will write different code that does the exact or very similar thing.
- gonzo 5y ago
  That’s not how patents work.
- coliveira 5y ago
  For patents, you can do your implementation, but you need to pay for the privilege.

snnn 5y ago

Firmware of TP-link routers is licensed under GPL. But would anyone of you get the source code? They say they provide machine-readable source code. I don't quite understand what it means.

andreareina 5y ago
I read that as minified/obfuscated. Which is not gpl compliant (not going to quote directly but there's language in there about having to provide the source in is preferred form for editing).
yuubi 5y ago
GPL 2 says "machine-readable", which I read as meaning on a tape or ftp site or something in a useful form, not handwritten on paper or similarly useless form. Also, I doubt obfuscated code would comply with the "preferred form" part.
kuang_eleven 5y ago
Like this page? https://www.tp-link.com/us/support/gpl-code/ https://www.tp-link.com/us/support/gpl-code/ It's not even slightly hidden, pretty easy to get the code.

pabs3 5y ago

I'm hoping Software Freedom Conservancy's Vizio lawsuit will enable Linux users to sue over Linux GPL violations and get compliance. Currently only Linux copyright holders can sue, but Conservancy believes that users are third-party beneficiaries of the GPL and thus should have standing to sue for GPL compliance. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

jeremyjh 5y ago
Did you even read the article?

phendrenad2 5y ago

Related reading: https://lwn.net/Articles/860262/ https://lwn.net/Articles/860262/ Key takeaway: > purveyors of proprietary modules have engaged in a number of tricks to get around GPL-only exports There are many technical workarounds possible still. You could scan the kernel binary for byte patterns and build your own export list. How will the kernel maintainers plug that hole? (Maybe they can implement compile-time binary obfuscation, and sacrifice performance to stop proprietary code, wouldn't that be funny?) I think that these efforts to prevent (what the kernel developers see as) "license infringement" through technical means sort of reveals that they don't really think that the line of reasoning would hold up in court.

eqvinox 5y ago

There is a difference between derivative works and composite works. Please learn it. (This specifically applies to the userspace boundary discussions in this article, but for modules it's not 100% clear-cut either.) I'm not going to try to explain it here because I'm not a lawyer and don't want to propagate what could be my flawed understanding. I do think I've understood it and that it matters here. There's probably a few good explainers from legally versed people out there on the WWW.

rob_c 5y ago

If this were taken to an extreme then nothing proprietary could run on this kernel. That is not the intent of the code authors in many cases and frankly the wording of GPLv2 being so vague here is as Linus has said part of it's strength. Given the very open context of how it's taken by the community the worst that will ever happen is the kernel eventually getting relicensed under GPLv2+Legal_Pedantry rather than nVidia or vmware being forced to open up their product codebases. Frankly this then gets even messier when considering copyright law, frankly given the weird status of an ABI/API in legal definitions this is the fault of the courts not the linux-kernel or the software devs...

SOF3 5y ago

Is GPL even significant nowadays other than annoying programmers? A lot of commercial software are provided as cloud services and GPL has no effect on them anyway. If you are really a fan of the viral nature of GPL, you should be using AGPL anyway.