Messages in this thread |  | | From | David Woodhouse <> | Subject | Re: Tainted Modules Help Notices | Date | Wed, 10 Oct 2001 19:18:30 +0100 |
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alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk said: > Subject to patent holdings. If you hold a patent on the BSD code you > can't GPL it
That's not wonderfully clear. They don't have to _restrict_ your rights - just neglect to grant you the right to use the algorithm in question, which you didn't have in the first place anyway.
> nor is it GPL compatible.
I believe that statement is as true as the assertion that nobody, even in the Free World, can write GPL'd code which use the algorithms covered by the patent.
Either way, I didn't think that a political stance against patents was the point of the kernel tainting code - I thought it was about maintainability.
> The problem we have is that "BSD without advertisment" can be claimed > by almost any binary only module whose author doesnt include source or > let it out fo their company ever
GPL can also be claimed by a module whose author doesn't publish either the source or the binary, or who charges lots and lots of money for shipping the binary and ships the source with it with a 'request' that the recipient doesn't then give it away for free.
But if we're not going to allow BSD-licensed modules to be loaded without tainting the kernel, we shouldn't mark any of the code distributed with the kernel as BSD-licensed - we should make it all "Dual BSD/GPL" instead.
It might also be useful to have a 'Dual GPL/Other' option, for covering the other randomly dual-licensed code (like JFFS2).
-- dwmw2
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