Tainting

Posted Sep 8, 2006 18:52 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

There should be a way for the userspace driver to state its license and the kernel should be tainted if it is not GPL compatible.

Toward what end?

The stated purpose of the existing taint flag is to warn a kernel engineer who might try to diagnose and fix a kernel problem that he doesn't have all the source code, so he might want to refuse. But the system call interface is supposed to be a thick enough barrier that kernel engineers don't normally require source code for what's running on the other side of it in order to work on the kernel.