Slashdot Mirror
Kernel Modules that Lie About Their Licenses
jon787 writes "An email to LKML about the Linuxant's HSF Modem drivers lying to the kernel about their license has prompted some interesting replies. Lots of talk about how to effectively blacklist these kind of things; a patch is here. One of the more interesting is this one. Linus as always has his $0.02."
/0 is like a divide-by-zero error, actually.
\0 is like a period.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
This isn't about fanaticism. This is about the overworked lkml guys not supporting binary drivers for the companies.
The kernel will happily load any modules you tell it to, binary or not, licensed or not. The reason this tag exists is so the loading of a binary driver will "taint" your kernel. That way when you submit a bug report, the kernel developers know that you had a binary only module loaded.
In that case, they'll ask you to reproduce the produce without the binary module loaded. If the problem doesn't happen, it's the vendor's problem, and not Linux's. And rightly so.
What's wrong with this?
Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 + 2 = 4
Putting MODULE_LICENSE("GPL") is not requred to make the module load. All it does is enable access to a small amount of GPL only helpers and keep crash reports from flagging the system as "tainted".
If Office 2003 started asking the Win32 API - areYouReallyMicrosoftWindows(). Then MS Windows would return true...
What would Wine get to return?
Wine would get to return true as well, if answering true was essential to get the software to work.
Take the case of the gameboy (I think). One of the checks the thing did when loading a game was to look for the Nintendo logo in the header of the game. If it wasn't there, it wouldn't run it. Someone else put the logo in their games to get it to run, Nintendo sued for trademark infringement. Nintendo lost, because they had made it absolutely necessary to include that logo in order for third parties to achieve interoperability with the product. Instead of preventing third parties from developing games (which was what they wanted), they lost control of their trademark to some degree. Not good.
However, this case is different. You don't need to lie to the kernel about your license to achieve interoperability. It'll load the module regardless of what you put in the license string. The only thing the license string does is to signal to the kernel developers that non-free modules are loaded into the kernel. It's been "tainted", and then they can choose to not support problems with tainted kernels.
This isn't lying to the kernel so much as it is lying to the kernel developers.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
LinuxAnt have responded.
Here is the answer from Linuxant. They claim it wasn't a mistake, just a way to suppress potentially confusing warning messages.