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Bruce Perens Warns Grsecurity Breaches the Linux Kernel's GPL License (perens.com)
Bruce Perens co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond. Now he's sharing a "strong opinion" that companies should avoid the Grsecurity security patch for the Linux kernel "because it presents a contributory infringement and breach of contract risk." Slashdot reader NewGnu shared Bruce's comments:
[I]t would fail a fair-use test... Because of its strongly derivative nature of the kernel, it must be under the GPL version 2 license, or a license compatible with the GPL and with terms no more restrictive than the GPL. Earlier versions were distributed under GPL version 2... My understanding from several reliable sources is that customers are verbally or otherwise warned that if they redistribute the Grsecurity patch, as would be their right under the GPL, that they will be assessed a penalty: they will no longer be allowed to be customers, and will not be granted access to any further versions of Grsecurity. GPL version 2 section 6 explicitly prohibits the addition of terms such as this redistribution prohibition...
This is tantamount to the addition of a term to the GPL prohibiting distribution or creating a penalty for distribution. GPL section 6 specifically prohibits any addition of terms. Thus, the GPL license, which allows Grsecurity to create its derivative work of the Linux kernel, terminates, and the copyright of the Linux Kernel is infringed. The contract from the Linux kernel developers to both Grsecurity and the customer which is inherent in the GPL is breached.
Perens advises companies to discuss his position with their attorneys, adding "In the public interest, I am willing to discuss this issue with companies and their legal counsel, under NDA, without charge."
This is tantamount to the addition of a term to the GPL prohibiting distribution or creating a penalty for distribution. GPL section 6 specifically prohibits any addition of terms. Thus, the GPL license, which allows Grsecurity to create its derivative work of the Linux kernel, terminates, and the copyright of the Linux Kernel is infringed. The contract from the Linux kernel developers to both Grsecurity and the customer which is inherent in the GPL is breached.
Perens advises companies to discuss his position with their attorneys, adding "In the public interest, I am willing to discuss this issue with companies and their legal counsel, under NDA, without charge."
Grsecurity is snakeoil dogshit.
Don't bother with grsecurity.
Their approach has always been "we don't care if we break anything, we'll just claim it's because we're extra secure".
The thing is a joke, and they are clowns. When they started talking about people taking advantage of them, I stopped trying to be polite about their bullshit.
Their patches are pure garbage.
Linus
Unless of course the goal is to keep the software open/modifiable by all while disallowing poaching by closed source developers. This frees the project from parasitic closed developers. They'll have to write their own code if they want to keep it closed.
i usually fall into the "GPL is less free than BSD" camp, but in this case I agree fully with Perens. the Linux kernel is GPL, everyone who works on it agrees accepts that. if you don't like the GPL or the conditions it places on you, or how you (and others) can distribute your code - then go the fuck somewhere else.
Clippy says, "It appears you're starting yet another GPL vs. BSD holy war discussion. Would You Like Help?"
* Yes, please link to one of the approximately 17,000 near-identical discussions of this nature we've already had on Slashdot over the years.
* No, I'd rather pointlessly go through the exact same longwinded to-ing and fro-ing and restatements of the same old facts purely to indulge my personal need, despite the fact I know the chances of any new insight coming out of the billionth tedious discussion of this long-established subject is next to nothing, despite the fact that those on both sides feel the need to repeat the same entrenched positions- which mostly come down to personal philosophy and not an incomplete understanding of the issues (which everyone knows full well by now) and will therefore be unlikely to change in the face of the discussion (not that this was the point anyway).
(Joking aside, I'm pretty sure the OP knows all this and is intentionally trolling; I'm also pretty sure the replying AC above isn't, which IMHO makes it worse).
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
You should read the entire statement, because there are things missing from the quote above that are important. The most important part is the legal theory:
Also, this is important to keep me in compliance with the law:
It's important to consider the goals of the GPL. You get great Free Software, but it's not a gift. It is sharing with rules that must be followed. You are required to keep it Free. And one of the implied purposes of the GPL is to cause more great Free Software to be made. This means that derivative works that are not shared really go against the purpose as well as the wording of the GPL.
Bruce Perens.
Dear AC,
If that's really their intent, they're confused. Or maybe you don't understand? The GPL doesn't have anything to do with trademarks. And Grsecurity did not bother to create a trademark for their product that was different from the versions with the old GPL-only terms, which are still in use. If trademark was the problem, they'd need to create a new one for their commercial product.
This, unfortunately, would not mitigate the GPL issue, which is copyright and contract related.
Bruce Perens.
How? You're completely forbidden to make derivative works of Microsoft Windows. You're also forbidden to distribute it in any way.
Indeed, as we know free is not gratis.
The GPL keeps the existing software and its derivatives free to use by and for all.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
"Most quotes on the internet are made up."
- Albert Einstein
Yeah, right there you've demonstrated the "internet problem" in a nut shell... taking an Abraham Lincoln quote and then mis-attributing it to Albert Einstein.
#DeleteChrome
Bill,
Debian would have the previous version before this licensing problem came up.
I am not the plaintiff in any theoretical case, and in any case am not interested in suing Debian. That's not me. But this should be a wake-up call to Debian.
Regarding CDDL vs. GPL, Sun quite deliberately applied that license and refused to dual-license. One would imagine they had Linux in mind when that decision was made. Oracle continues that. It doesn't seem that anyone on the Linux side started that fight. And given the decision in Oracle v. Google that copyright can pass across APIs, at Oracle's behest, it does not seem to me that CDDL-GPL combinations are legally safe even if you dynamically link.
Bruce Perens.
"The definition of insanity is misquoting the same thing over and over and expecting different attributions."
- President Benjamin Franklin
lucm, indeed.
Did you really ask this? Seriously. Did you?
Your opinion of GPL aside, are you remotely aware of law at all? Seriously. Are you?
I'd be curious to see if on your keyboard the "?" key is as worn down as the space bar.
lucm, indeed.
Actually, the GPL and a trademark registration will keep just what you're talking about from happening. Going proprietary won't give you any more protection unless you're talking about just locking up the source. But you have to enforce once in a while to keep idiots from breaking the rules.
Bruce Perens.
That's your right. Of course, this matters more if you've actually released anything under it.
I should tell you, though, I have had more than one person who used gift-style licenses come crying to me about how badly they were abused. Some decide the GPL is a better idea too late...
Bruce Perens.
Right. Nobody and their legal counsel want to talk about this without an NDA. I am taking on some liability by accepting an NDA and still doing the whole thing for free.
Bruce Perens.
The GPL does not require any "giving back". It says that if you change the software, and give the changed version to somebody else, you must give them (a) the source code and (b) a GPL-compatible license for the combined/modified software. You could call that obligatory giving forward, but not obligatory giving back.
This is a very large discussion and I'm not going to put in the hour necessary to explain it fully. One of the relevant cases is Galoob Games v. Nintendo. In that case, the Game Genie made by Galoob, which let you have infinite lifetime and ammo and thus cheat in Nintendo games, was thought to be a derivative work by Nintendo. Galoob won, because the Game Genie connected to a plug and only modified a few memory locations.
Unlike the modularity of the Game Genie and that of some of the other things you mention, Grsecurity does not limit itself to dealing with Linux through its APIs (like the plugs in the Nintendo console and game cartrige). Instead, Grsecurity gets dirty fingers all over the kernel internals. So, it's derivative.
I am very much a supporter of right to repair and to interoperate, and we should discuss that another time.
Bruce Perens.
It however do allow people to keep the metaphorical slaves as long as they swear to uphold the holy GPL.
No one is forcing the GPL on anyone.
Absolutely no one is forced to take GPL code and do anything with it. Not a single person.
Slaves do not by definition have the choice to not be a slave.
If you don't want to "uphold the holy GPL" as you call it, you are perfectly free to get code in any one of many other ways.
You can find code licensed in some other way.
You can learn to code and write your own.
You can pay someone to write it for you and give you copyright ownership, after which you can license it in anyway you please, including not licencing it at all.
You are the one redefining "freedom", "slaves", and "forced" here.
The growth in use of permissive licenses (particularly if you look at github) over restrictive ones is a demonstration of pragmatism and the idea that not everything must be free and we can have non-free and free components working together and cooperating rather than focussing on a pure free software ideology.
I wouldn't necessarily even go that far. I am entirely in favour of a world in which all software comes with the FSF's four freedoms. The reason I release code under FreeBSD / MIT licenses is that this seems like a path that has an actual transition plan. If there's a BSDL project available that does 90% of what you need, then you can adopt it and add the remaining 10% without needing to change your business model. Most of the time, it's then cheaper to release the code. If it doesn't give you a competitive advantage, then upstreaming your changes means that your maintenance costs go down (and, often, other people will fix your bugs, in exchange for being able to use your new features).
If there's only a GPL'd project available, then I've worked with a lot of companies that aren't 100% sure that they will never want to do anything that the GPL prohibits and so will instead write a proprietary version (if you're lucky, you can persuade them to write a permissively licensed version). The GPL'd project doesn't ever enter the company (particularly with GPLv3, where anyone who owns patents gets very nervous) and so they never see the benefits of Free Software. It doesn't provide them with a transition path.
This transition path is particularly important because around 90% of all software developers are employed by companies that are not primarily computer companies. They are developing software for in-house use and so implicitly have all of the four freedoms (because they own the copyright), but don't contribute anything to the wider ecosystem (other than money to Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and so on). Getting them to start using, contributing to, and then preferring open source solutions can unlock a lot of developer resources.
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