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The kernel devs went out of their way to label a whole bunch of kernel functions as GPL only. It's not about mainlining third party kernel modules, it's about n

The kernel devs went out of their way to label a whole bunch of kernel functions as GPL only. It's not about mainlining third party kernel modules, it's about not letting non-GPLed modules use certain functions in the kernel. This includes the fully open source OpenZFS project. It's not about CDDL / GPL incompatibilities. For OpenZFS it was some FPU context switching functions that had to be worked around when the kernel team labelled those functions as GPL only. See: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/13042 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/13042

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
You seem confused. There is no mysterious GPL only label in the kernel. The whole thing is licensed under the GPL v2 period. It’s just that some ABI were broken for an unrelated reason as Linux doesn’t guaranty ABI stability and OpenZFS can’t find an alternative which satisfy their dependency needs. The kernel team doesn’t care about out of tree code when making changes. It has always been the rule.
- palunon 4y ago
  > There is no mysterious GPL only label in the kernel EXPORT_GPL_ONLY
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    Yes, you are right. I didn’t know the API was tagged. My take seems indeed a bit too extreme. The kernel does care about enforcing the GPL explicitly on some of the interface it presents to modules to ensure the openness of the code which is indeed a form of statement in favour of open code. I don’t think the situation was the same regarding compiling only with GCC - after all clang is free software - and I think the heart of my argument still hold: the kernel community makes decisions mostly for reason related to the kernel - even there they just want to force code to be mainlined - rather than for the movement like the FSS.