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."

Comments

Can't get over it

[Rotworm]

I don't believe that. Companies that make hardware shouldn't be so dogged about protecting their software. I buy a router/etc for the hardware, not for the companies excellent firmware. I don't see why companies should protect their firmware at all, if it's open source, more people will buy their hardware.

Re:Good Luck

[Sloppy]

there's no compatibility reason to export a dishonest description of the module's license.

Sure there is. Say you're the company that makes the winmodems (or whatever this hardware is). Your customer files a bug report for something totally unrelated to the modem driver code, say a filesystem bug. Hans Reiser decides he has better things to do that worry about whether or not some uninitialized pointer in the winmodem driver code happens to be corrupting disk buffers, so he files the report in /dev/null. (Now maybe that's a wise thing for him to do, but still, maybe it was also a real bug in the filesystem. Whatever.) The customer's problem doesn't get looked at. The customer gets unhappy. The customer finds out that it's because of your driver, that they're unhappy. They decide to not buy any more of your crappy undocumented winmodems. You pay a price in the market.

Now I kind of like that justice, but that's because I happen to fucking hate winmodems even more than I hate closed drivers. It's still a pretty good reason, though, to have your driver lie to the kernel. Maybe, just maybe, you're sure your driver is ok, and don't want its closed-ness to get in the way of people getting bug reports for completely different parts of the kernel.