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 :-)
Linux's GPLv2 licence is routinely violated (2015)
11–20 of 202 posts
Re: Linux's GPLv2 licence is routinely violated (2015)
#12I 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.
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.
Re: Linux's GPLv2 licence is routinely violated (2015)
#13This is no cure, but quite a few kernel developers have signed this: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.16/process/kernel-enforce...
Re: Linux's GPLv2 licence is routinely violated (2015)
#14While 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
Re: Linux's GPLv2 licence is routinely violated (2015)
#15I 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.
Re: Linux's GPLv2 licence is routinely violated (2015)
#16Good 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.
Re: Linux's GPLv2 licence is routinely violated (2015)
#17While 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…
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.
Re: Linux's GPLv2 licence is routinely violated (2015)
#18I 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 restr…
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.
Re: Linux's GPLv2 licence is routinely violated (2015)
#19I 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.
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.
>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.
Re: Linux's GPLv2 licence is routinely violated (2015)
#20I 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.
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.
My company does whatever it can to comply with GPL requirements and it is nothing short of a goddamn nightmare. Nothing like sitting in a conference room for hours with lawyers while we poured through the licenses for 250 different packages; we would have been better off just burning the money. My conclusions are that most Linux distributions are an amalgam of software packages with licenses that are fundamentally incompatible with each other; the GPL is extremely poorly written with lots of vagaries. I don't think there is a path to 100% compliance; you just make sure your heart is in the right place and hope for the best.
Ultimately, we concluded we are moving to BSD on future projects where possible. Not because of some overwhelming need to keep source closed from customers, rather just to avoid the mess.