LWN: Comments on "Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?"

Proprietary loadable kernel modules

nix — Mon, 09 May 2011 11:12:25 +0000

Yes, you did. Over and over again. What you failed to indicate is why we should care at all, much less why we should consider her employment credentials more significant than the things she's done under the groklaw banner. "Florian does it" is not sufficient evidence.

Proprietary loadable kernel modules

FlorianMueller — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 20:33:48 +0000

You miss the point here. I never said that non-lawyers are ineligible to talk about those matters. I pointed out that the avatar named "PJ" doesn't provide any background other than the status of "paralegal".

Proprietary loadable kernel modules

nix — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 20:31:26 +0000

What? Florian's not even a lawyer? But he spouts off so much about other poeple (hello PJ) not being lawyers and therefore not being eligible to say a blessed thing...

*boggle*

What's the point of this article?

stevem — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 16:14:52 +0000

Good call to cover this Jon, and it's a well written piece from Jake too.

It's also (hilarious|annoying) to see Mueller's attempts to justify his FUD; any chance of a vote to simply drop/ban his account?

Naughton didn't do enough research to justify his conclusions.

krakensden — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 19:32:23 +0000

> Your analogy with the beaten wife (maybe could have come up with a less bizarre example anyway) doesn't work

He's referencing a famous explanation of 'poisoning the well', a rhetorical strategy.

Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

Duncan — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 05:54:45 +0000

Note that I'm neither a lawyer nor a kernel dev. If you're trying to use my posts as legal justification for anything contextually related without getting the opinion of professionals in at least one of those fields, your nuts!

Yours is the first post I've seen to bring out the important SCO headers point. Linux itself is dependent on the principle of headers being factual/technical presentations of the ABI and thus uncopyrightable as such. After all, Unix (R) Signal numbers, etc, as used by Linux, come from such headers. But there's quite some case history establishing such headers as interface facts, not copyrightable at least in the US.

In fact, at least within the US, the principle goes further as well. Independent reimplementations done specifically for interoperability with the public interface as customarily expressed in the headers are generally specifically allowed as well. Again, that's (part of) what let Linux off the hook in terms of the Unix (R) signal interface and (one of) the reason(s) that code couldn't be properly held as evidence of infringement. (Another was the fact that said signal interface code had been published in a public context in sources predating either SCO or Linux, said sources likely being the common source for both, thus SCO's confusion when they appeared to be duplicates.) As such, yes, the kernel headers as BOTH Google Bionic and glibc use them COULD be used as a basis for an independent kernel reimplementation. Without an audit it's certainly possible that a few trivial violations could leak thru, and that's actually what I expect all the experts that FM is pointing at are allowing for -- they've not done that audit and aren't under retainer to do it or to make a legally valid opinion as representing anyone, so they're allowing themselves the typical out that even debaters quickly learn -- don't make all inclusive statements without some out, some qualifier, if one hasn't actually done the work necessary to ensure no trivial logic leak, since an all-inclusive statement without qualifier is disproved with the most trivial possible exception.

But the point is, Google's sufficiently GPL averse to have avoided the Linux kernel and chosen a BSD implementation, or written or bought their own from elsewhere, if the Linux kernel itself didn't have SOME overriding value. That they chose Linux in spite of their otherwise GPL aversion demonstrates the value they consider it to have. Reimplementation? Perhaps, if you've got a couple billion dollars to pour down a rat hole. And why would they do that, starting from scratch, when they could have simply based on a BSD instead, avoiding the whole GPL issue? Certainly, Google's got a lot of money to throw around if it wants, but as equally certainly, it's not going to have it for long if it starts doing such useless things as a from-scratch Linux reimplmentation when it could have started with one of the BSDs instead.

Also, keep in mind that as Greg KH and others are fond of pointing out, Linux now runs on the widest variety of hardware, with drivers for the widest variety of hardware, of any OS out there. And while the USER application binary interface (ABI) as expressed in those headers may be fair game, the in-kernel modular interface expressly is NOT, with many internal kernel declarations exported for module use specifically as
GPL-only and with specifically NO stable internal ABI, so they can and often do change kernel to kernel. Despite the ability to legally write to the publicly exported USER interface, that's going to leave any non-GPL rewrite without the legal ability to use all those drivers, etc, and it's technically a moving target if they try. Which puts any attempter severely in the hole again, as compared to just starting with one of the BSDs, for instance.

So it's unlikely to happen, unless of course perhaps as a personal hobby, perhaps of some random Finnish college student... and who could rightly predict where THAT might lead! =:^)

Duncan

»Managing« comments?

farnz — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:39:51 +0000

I used to pay for the project leader level of subscription, in large part so that when an article relevant to my company appeared, I could send my management a link to it and not feel guilty. I can't stop my management looking at the comments - if you're not logged in (they don't even have accounts here), you have no comment filtering at all.

So, I'm afraid that those commenters who treat LWN's comments section as a place for personal attacks (I at least work somewhere where robust technical argument is understood) have destroyed my reason for paying for the site. A technical fix on LWN's part would be to provide me with a way of sending comments-free links, or links with my comment filtering applied (maybe something to offer for project leaders); then, at least, I could send my management links to interesting articles, knowing that they won't latch onto the flamewar in the comments section and chastise me.

»Managing« comments?

anselm — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 11:21:54 +0000

I for one would much rather see Jon and his colleagues spend their time on producing quality editorial content than on policing comments. Presumably, people are here for the original content rather than the comments. Nobody is forced to read the comments, anyway, and there's even a way to get rid of the more obnoxious commenters.

I suppose if there is to be some sort of »management« of comments it will have to be »crowd-sourced« so as to not take time away from our esteemed journalists – this seems to call for a Slashdot-type up/downvoting system with a user-customisable threshold (so people who are here for the personal attacks and he-said-she-said can still get it if they want). Voting – or the use of this system altogether – could even be restricted to paying subscribers to make the subscriptions more attractive.

Other than that, it is up to us (the readership) to do our thing for comment quality, by posting considered and courteous comments and deliberately not engaging in flame wars with obvious trolls.

Herrn Muller Again

farnz — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 10:55:30 +0000

I found the articles and the letters to the editor useful - the clarifications and expansions in letters to the editor were adding value.

When comments were introduced, they also added value; the people who were writing the letters to the editor shifted to writing comments. Over time, people providing intelligent comments have been drowned out in favour of personal attacks and rants; as a nice side effect, you've ensured that I cannot safely send a Subscriber Link to my managers, because I will get pulled up on spending work time on a site that's so poorly managed if the comments happen to degenerate - and there's no way to predict which articles will do that.

I don't know what the solution is - if I did, I'd be e-mailing LWN with it again; I do know that the shift in SNR on LWN has meant I no longer find it worthwhile paying for access, and that comments that basically boil down to "guys, the SNR is low" don't help improve it. I can only hope that a gradual loss of income will convince Corbet et al to find a way to improve it.

Herrn Muller Again

foom — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 16:15:18 +0000

But LWN doesn't implement editorial control over comments at all, only the articles. If you find only the article useful, and not the comments, it's surely rather easy to avoid reading the comments.

I, for one, find the comments overall quite interesting and useful, although there are certainly some particular topics for which they are less so.

Herrn Muller Again

farnz — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:43:42 +0000

Don't waste time complaining about LWN's poor editorial choices - vote with your wallet and stop subscribing.

It's becoming increasingly clear recently (the last couple of years or so) that LWN is not able to apply the sort of editorial control needed to keep the comments section useful, preferring instead to act as a forum for he said/she said argumentation as found on Slashdot. Maybe LWN should go back to running a "letters to the editor" section, and remove comments completely?

Naughton didn't do enough research to justify his conclusions.

malor — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 00:43:36 +0000

Florian, you are just being freaking ridiculous here. You have yet to state an actual cause for action, but you post again and again and AGAIN, in every Android thread, screaming about possible infringement. I mean, you've actually used the term 'copyright laundering' with a straight face.

Here's the deal. If you think there's infringement, prove that there's infringement. It'll take a hell of a lot of work. But that's the ONLY basis from which you can be making those kinds of claims

Your current claim seems to amount to this: certain specific people aren't stating with absolute certainty that there's no infringement. Therefore, there must be infringement. This is stupid.

They don't want to do all that digging in header files they didn't author; they don't want to do the work any more than you do.
Even if they did all that work, and then registered the strong opinion that there was no infringement, it wouldn't matter, because they don't have standing to make that determination.
Only the people who wrote the headers can make an infringement claim. And if they don't care, if they've released the headers under a permissive license, then there is no issue. Only their opinion is important. Bradley Kuhn's and Jake Edge's are entirely irrelevant.
Yet, you insist on screaming that because unrelated people without legal standing won't put many hours of work into analyzing headers, that means Android is untrustworthy.

This is called "pushing an agenda", Florian. You look like a paid astroturfer to me.

Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

ccurtis — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 22:53:50 +0000

Ignoring for a moment that this is expressly permitted, it seems like the concern is this:

The kernel provides two de-facto outputs: (1) a GPL-covered kernel, and (2) "Headers for libc implementations".

From a commercial standpoint this is akin to a free version and paid release (or a dual-licensed release). That one is generated by "just a script" is immaterial. What's relevant is that two independent artifacts are created.

Now, Google, instead of using the official "Headers for libc" wrote their own script. This script could have been 'cat' or anything else - what is material is that the copyright notices are stripped. Normally, I think everyone agrees that it is wrong to strip the copyright from a file whether it's a C file, an H file, or GPL-licensed documentation.

So: wouldn't it be easier to update the "official" script, bundled with the kernel sources, to replace the copyright notice in the generated headers with an express lack of copyright notice? If these headers are not GPL covered, clearly they shouldn't say that they are. Right?

Proprietary loadable kernel modules

rgmoore — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:42:18 +0000

The stated intent of the kernel hackers (or anyone in a similar position) has a great deal of effect when they say that something is permitted. If Linus says "you're in the clear as long as you don't use anything within #define GPL", then he can be legally barred from turning around and suing somebody when they take him seriously. Even without a formal statement along those lines, officially designating some symbols as GPL only implies that the rest of the symbols may be used by non-GPL modules.

Proprietary loadable kernel modules

filipjoelsson — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 21:17:13 +0000

If you refer to the ABI when you write "all the fruit", then you are correct. Isolating the ABI is what the header laundering is all about. It's just that THE ABI IS EXPLICITLY NOT COVERED in the COPYING file!

I do not belong to the group who think you are spreading FUD, but that's just because I recognize that you are a troll.

Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

vonbrand — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 20:00:25 +0000

I didn't mean to imply it was easy, just the best way out. And the authors of the userland headers (at least the part that survives the non-glue removal) can't be that spread out, the gang of the usual suspects who have been hacking the kernel for almost two decades now surely wrote the inmensely overwhelming majority of this.

Proprietary loadable kernel modules

vonbrand — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 19:53:01 +0000

OK, perhaps I misspoke. What I meant is that the kernel gang considers stuff using userland interfaces OK under whatever licence you fancy (not in the sense that such code is "not derivative", but that that such use is allowed), while using kernel-internal interfaces (specially ones marked GPL-only) is strictly GPL. It might be that the law says that both uses create derivatives, in which case you are being given an explicit permission for userland while in-kernel use is strictly GPL-only because it is a derivative; or it might say neither does, in which case the whole discussion is moot.

Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

giraffedata — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 19:07:24 +0000

Perhaps the best way to get out of all this mess would be for the kernel folks to agree that

They can't. "Kernel folks" in this case means copyright holders of the kernel header files. It isn't feasible to find them all and get a new copyright license from them.

Contrary to appearances, neither Linus nor the kernel maintainers have the power to permit any particular copying/deriving of the kernel.

Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

butlerm — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 17:04:41 +0000

You can't launder something that isn't copyrightable in the first place. As ably explained by the court in Baystate v. Bentley Systems (1996), technical interfaces aren't legitimately protected by copyright.

Google could take the entire internal technical interface to the Linux kernel modulo substantive inline functions, rewrite it in any form by any means whatsoever, distribute it under any "license" they feel like, and probably be entirely in the clear, so far as the law of the United States is concerned.

You, go, Jon!

butlerm — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:24:23 +0000

District court decisions do not count as binding precedent, certainly. That doesn't mean they aren't widely influential, in terms of logic and reasoning. The idea is to interpret the law, not make it up, right?

If the district court's ruling is a tour de force of rationality, any other court is going to have a difficult time issuing a contrary one. This particular decision treated the issues here in greater depth than any previous U.S. court, and should reasonably be treated as a guide to the way other courts would rule when faced with the same question.

Proprietary loadable kernel modules

etienne — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 14:04:16 +0000

The intent of the kernel hackers is a bit like the intent of GCC developers when they say that the resulting executable is not a derived work of GCC, or the intent of word processors developers when they say the final document is fully owned by the author of said document.
If the law disagree that may have very high consequences.

Proprietary loadable kernel modules

vonbrand — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:07:12 +0000

That is the intent of the kernel hackers; whether the law agrees with this is quite another thing...

It's not the exception...

foom — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 12:12:53 +0000

Er, duh, of course. I think my brain was off when I asked that. I remember now that LWN.net even covered the issue in an article I commented upon. :)

http://lwn.net/Articles/343608/

It's not the exception...

khim — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 07:00:54 +0000

I don't think that's the case; can you point out the clause of the GCC Runtime Library Exception that you think restricts distribution on the same medium?

It's not the exception. It's GPL v2, again. The same problem: However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.. Independent GPLv2-only program is safe. But if you include GPLv2-only program and GCC on a single medium - you are violating GPLv2 (often, but not always: while libstdc++ is included in most C++ programs and indeed is complex and copyrightable libgcc is much simpler and on some platforms like x86 it does not put anything copyrightable in С program). I'll not play Microsoft Florian and claim it immediately spells "the end of the world": it's not enough to violate someone's copyright. That someone must sue your first or at least claim it's offended. And if he can easily decide that in reality he's not offended and actually wants to permit such redistribution (like MySQL did), but it's genuine license violation and so is landmine...

P.S. In reality it's not 100% true: in some countries it is possible to sue someone even if the copyright owner is not objecting and even win the case, we are talking about sane jurisdictions here.

You, go, Jon!

branden — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 06:49:18 +0000

That's useful, but I cannot find any record that this decision was appealed.

This is important because the holdings in the case were by a federal *district* court. If it had been appealed, it would have gone to a federal appellate court--the holdings of appellate courts are binding upon that court's jurisdiction (the district, the circuit, or the entire U.S. depending on the appellate court level).

District Court opinions do not constitute precedent in the United States. Any court anywhere in the U.S., including that *same* district court, is at liberty to completely disregard the findings and results in this case (unless they have a local rule to the contrary, which might be the case).

Naughton didn't do enough research to justify his conclusions.

jtc — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 05:27:53 +0000

"Re 2: Linus and RMS are talking explicitly about this exact point in the emails I link. Their intent surely means something here... if somebody came out of the woods and claimed their lines in *.h were meant only for use in GPLed code, the above, unambiguous, statements to the contrary (which as a contributor to the kernel everybody is aware of) would surely get them into big trouble."

In other words, this quote, above, is 100% incorrect:

"Re 2) What Linus Torvalds and RMS said is not related to Bionic and doesn't answer any of the legal questions at issue here."

Naughton didn't do enough research to justify his conclusions.

jtc — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 05:22:00 +0000

It seems to me that one of the main points of misunderstanding in this issue is this quote from the LWN article of what Naughton supposedly said in his advisory:

"But if Google is right, if it has succeeded in removing all copyrightable material from the Linux kernel headers, then it has unlocked the Linux kernel from the restrictions of GPLv2. Google can now use the "clean" Bionic headers to create a non-GPL'd fork of the Linux kernel, one that can be extended under proprietary license terms...."

How does using kernel headers in user-space binaries (bionic) (which is allowed according to the quoted statements from Linus) imply that it is legal (allowed by the license) to use kernel headers to produce a non-GPL fork of the Linux kernel (which is not user-space, but kernel space)? I think the answer is "There is no such implication."

It seems to me that making a sound judgement on this issue requires both legal and technical expertise. The quote of Naughton's appears to indicate that he may have sound legal expertise, but he does not at all appear to have sound technical expertise, nor to have a sound technical consultant at his disposal.

The result appears to be a bogus argument based on a technical misunderstanding.

I'm not so sure...

foom — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:28:12 +0000

I don't think that's the case; can you point out the clause of the GCC Runtime Library Exception that you think restricts distribution on the same medium?

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception.html

It looks like it allows that, to me...

Herrn Muller Againn Tzafrir

baldridgeec — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:32:47 +0000

Perhaps there should be an entry in missing(7) :)

Proprietary loadable kernel modules

baldridgeec — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:28:30 +0000

I should probably keep my mouth shut, not being a kernel developer, but I have always understood a (non-GPL) loadable kernel module's ability to link to code as being governed by the "#define GPL" sections.

This obviously DOES NOT mean that they cannot have include files which also have text defining the GPLed interfaces (indeed, AFAIK most if not all proprietary LKMs simply #include the kernel's own header files.) It is the use of those interfaces in the code which determines the behavior of cc and ld, and determines whether the module is considered a derivative work for the purpose of license compliance.

That being said, I'm not sure why the question of LKM licensing is coming up anyway, since Bionic is a reimplementation of libc, not a module.

I'm not so sure...

khim — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:29:57 +0000

I'd say, Which will not *ever* happen.

I'm not so sure. Note that any non-trivial GPLv2-only program written in C++ can not be distributed on the same medium as GCC (remember that libgcc was relicensed under GPLv3+exception in GCC 4.4). BTW this includes older versions of KDE :-)...

About the only piece of code which can be forever kept under GPLv2 license is kernel (because it does not use standard GCC libraries and headers). Everything else is risky (you must prove code pulled from libgcc.a is uncopyrightable - and it's not always the case... especially on the platforms without FPU).

P.S. You can forever keep library and/or program under LGPL v2.x - but it's not a problem since it can then be linked with LGPLv3-licenses GLibC...

Google should strip out unreferenced symbols... but it probably doesn't matter

rgmoore — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:06:28 +0000

Either they both are, or neither. Whatever it is that makes one copyrightable also makes the other copyrightable; they rise and fall together.

Even if both are copyrightable, Google's ability to use them without getting in copyright trouble is not necessarily the same. It may be fair use to copy the public symbols because they are part of a defined interface and hence necessary for compatibility. The same does not hold for the internal interface.

Google should strip out unreferenced symbols... but it probably doesn't matter

martinfick — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:26:40 +0000

> Some people in CompSci tends to think in overly strict principal lines, wanting the grey to go away. Perhaps this has something to do with how a computer works, in binary. But it's not how law works.

Or perhaps it's how reasonable people think? Many laws are designed to be wishy washy so that the people who speak in vague illogical terms and who spend money on lawyers can take advantage of those reasonable people who don't. Copyright is just one of the many examples of this. Patents are an obvious other.

The fact that this discussion is currently over 100 comments of bickering over the understanding of copyright, likely by professionals who actually operate in the copyright field daily, should tell you that the concept of copyright is beyond grey, and very vague. This is not a subject matter that any law could ever be fair about. It is not a subject matter that you could expect juries to reasonably agree upon in a consistent matter. It is simply a bad use (not just a bad implementation) of law.

Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

rgmoore — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 17:26:07 +0000

My loose (and, obviously, I am not a lawyer) understanding is that under US law the kernel could be considered either a joint work or a collective work

I'm not sure if the kernel would wind up being considered exclusively one or the other. It would be perfectly reasonable to consider each individual source file a joint work (what I called a collaboration) of the people who contributed to that individual file, while the source tree as a whole would be considered a collective work (what I called a compilation). Since the compiled kernel is a derivative of the whole source tree (delta any files that are configured out), it would be a joint work of all contributors.

And, of course, there are other little twists to consider. If I contributed a file 10 years ago that's still in the kernel, but all of the original code has been gradually ripped out and replaced, do I still have a valid copyright interest in the current version of the file? Does it matter if some of the comments I included in the original file, like a description of the file's purpose, are still there? What if the functions were taken out of the file, moved to other files, and later replaced; do I have some interest in the files that once contained functions I wrote? Does it matter if the functions were replaced before or after they were moved? This is potentially important if it turns out there are legal problems with my contribution, e.g. it's not really my work but copied from some other, GPL incompatible work. It's possible that there's a legal precedent describing something like that, but as IANAL I don't know the answer.

In a joint work I believe that any copyright holder could enforce the copyright of the entire work - but the flipside of that is that any copyright holder could also grant a non-exclusive license to anyone else, absent contractual obligations.

On the second part, the GPL would probably constitute the "contractual obligations" that would keep any author from relicensing willy-nilly. Anyone who contributed after the code was put under the GPL did so pursuant to that license; they're only allowed to make contributions with the understanding that the whole will be licensed under the GPL. That probably forbids them to relicense the work as a whole under other terms.

Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

paulj — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:48:43 +0000

These seem to be part of a kernel interface to user-space which, according to Linux licence, is generally held to be a copyright boundary. So your claim there likely is baseless.

There is perhaps a more fundamental problem, in that Google have built their Java userspace bluetooth stack on top of BlueZ. They have insulated their userspace by plugging a DBus proxy/agent in between their software and BlueZ code. However, while this may reduce the technical API dependence of most of their code, the functional fact remains that their Bluetooth stack appears to be dependent on GPL software (outside of that accessed via the Linux userspace API).

My experience of legal advice at another large corporate, in a similarish situation, is that sticking IPC between your code and GPL code does not, of itself, do anything to affect whether or not your code derives from the GPL code.

However, if the BlueZ copyright holders are cool with it, then there's no problem - regardless of what anyone else thinks.

https://sites.google.com/a/android.com/opensource/project...

Google should strip out unreferenced symbols... but it probably doesn't matter

ekj — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 08:18:55 +0000

Like always with non-trivial question the answer is "it depends".

Some people in CompSci tends to think in overly strict principal lines, wanting the grey to go away. Perhaps this has something to do with how a computer works, in binary. But it's not how law works.

If one sentence contains insufficient creativity and/or artistic skill to be worthy of copyright, it does -not- follow that 50 similarily well-written sentences as a whole *also* does not deserve copyright.

In practice, merely doing more of the same, can give copyright. The creativity and/or artistic skill which is there adds up, and at some point crosses the threshold. This message as a whole, for example, may well be sufficient - whereas any individual sentence in it, would likely not be. (and I'm sure many of the sentences have been used in a very similar form before by others)

What I'm saying is, you *cannot* generalise from trivial examples to the whole tree. It's certainly possible that each of the examples, in isolation, is unprotected, while the sum total is protected.

Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

FlorianMueller — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 07:18:03 +0000

While this discussion here appears to have subsided for the most part, I wanted to post this quick update. Yesterday I published more evidence of Google's habit of GPL laundering in Android: BlueZ and ext4. The related headers are not part of the /include/ directory path like the headers that C libraries use. Google uniquely deprived those programs of their copyright/copyleft protection.

That blog post also links to a timeline that shows that GPL laundering is part of Google's modus operandi. They started in 2008 and do it all the time. The changelogs indicate this. And I'm sure other companies will now do this, too.

I also did an infographic that shows how Android-related intellectual property litigation has exploded since last year. There are now 37 Android-related intellectual property lawsuits. Those who claim that no one is going to assert IPRs in GPL'd software against Android should consider how litigious this environment undoubtedly is. Also, the huge number of Android-related patent lawsuits is in no small part due to Google's arrogant and reckless approach to other people's intellectual property rights, which takes us full circle back to the GPL laundering issue.

Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

b7j0c — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 03:56:42 +0000

without copyright there would be no copyleft

Baseless accusations

job — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 17:21:30 +0000

There's baseless accusations and then there's just plain crazy. Even glibc would break copyright according to their twisted logic.

Müller did a lot of good against software patents. It's sad to see him chase every bone his new master throws him. Somehow I sincerely hope it pays well.

Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

brianomahoney — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 17:04:12 +0000

The best solution to this generic problem is not technical, or licence based, as all this stuff is reasonably well understood and changes here would not matter anyway.

What is going on here is that unscrupulous lawyers are making poorly supported claims in order to work up FUD, now in the mobile OS and apps market place, especially since Google has got great traction with Android ie Linux+Java. This has provoked a rush of actual, if very ill founded litigation from Oracle and others and has provoked the usual community storm in a teacup about licences, file striping and occasional packaging errors.

The upshot of this is that hardly any of this matters for two reasons resulting from Microsoft's earlier attempts at FUD (a) any business seriously planning to adopt Andriod will do its own legal due dilligence and make its decisions on its own lawyers reports, and (b) The Microsoft supported SCO trolling has made business managers much more aware of what was being done to them and why. Linux is now emplaced and well regarded in data centres, and the FUD fails.

For this reason, I would respectfully recommend to the community that it cease amplyfing the efforts of Trolls, FUDers and astroturfers and leave Muller in spleandid isolation.