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    SubjectRe: Non-GPL export of invalidate_mmap_range
    On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 04:28:58PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
    > OK, so I looked at the wrapper. It wasn't a tremendously pleasant
    > experience. It is huge, and uses fairly standard-looking filesytem
    > interfaces and locking primitives. Also some awareness of NFSV4 for some
    > reason.

    And pokes deep into internal structures that it shouldn't.

    > Still, the wrapper is GPL so this is not relevant.

    It's BSD licensed - they couldn't distribute it together with GPFS if
    it was GPL.

    > Its only use is to tell
    > us whether or not the non-GPL bits are "derived" from Linux, and it
    > doesn't do that.

    Well, something that needs an almost one megabyte big wrapper per defintion
    is not a standalone work but something that's deeply interwinded with
    the kernel. The tons of kernel version checks certainly show it's poking
    deeper than it should.

    > Why do you believe that GPFS represents a kernel licensing violation?

    See above. Something that pokes deep into internal structures and even
    needs new exports certainly is a derived work. There's a few different
    interpretations of the derived works clause in the GPL around, the FSF
    one wouldn't allow binary modules at all, and Linus' one is also pretty
    strict.


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