Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules

Posted Aug 28, 2023 16:00 UTC (Mon) by mb (subscriber, #50428)
In reply to: Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules by mathstuf
Parent article: Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules

>However, the interoperability here is well-defined: obey the GPL.

It's by far not that well-defined.
It's rather that some developer had the opinion that using a certain symbol would surely be a GPL violation. That is not well-defined at all.

Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules

Posted Aug 28, 2023 18:32 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Yup. The GPL is, unfortunately, as clear as mud (but it's not its fault).

It's full of assumptions as to what a derived work is (which is a matter for the law, not the GPL).

It's full of assumptions as to what is copyrightable subject matter (which again is the law, not the GPL).

The GPL is only clear when you're talking about statically linked binaries, which are rare as hens teeth on linux ...

And although my favourite system (Scarlet) is GPL, if I tried to use the GPL try to to stop people shipping systems chock full of binaries, with only the publically available source made available to the customer, I'd probably be on an extremely sticky wicket ...

Oh, and what happens if I build my own kernels (which I do, I run gentoo). All these (allegedly) proprietary modules which the kernel refuses to run, they CAN'T be GPL violations, because it was me that created the binary, and it's me running the binary, so the GPL doesn't apply.

Cheers,
Wol