A stable bug fix bites proprietary modules

The kernel-development community has long had a tense relationship with companies that create and ship proprietary loadable kernel modules. In the view of many developers, such modules are a violation of the GPL and should simply be disallowed. That has never happened, though; instead, the community has pursued a policy of legal ambiguity and technical inconvenience to discourage proprietary modules. A "technical-inconvenience" patch that was merged nearly one year ago has begun to show up in stable kernel releases, leading at least one developer to complain that things have gone a little too far.

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