[CentOS-devel] [EXT] Re: RFC: kmods SIG Proposal

Neal Gompa

ngompa13 at gmail.com
Fri May 21 13:00:01 UTC 2021


On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 8:58 AM Peter Georg
<peter.georg at physik.uni-regensburg.de> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 21/05/2021 13.01, Neal Gompa wrote:
> > On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 6:36 AM Alex Iribarren <alex.m.lists3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> On 5/20/21 8:33 PM, Neal Gompa wrote:
> >>>>>>> I'm a bit concerned that "non compatible license" is a bit vague.
> >>>>>>> Would this exclude DRBD, ZFS on Linux, OpenAFS, or nVidia?  The nVidia
> >>>>>>> bits seem to be 'yes, it is excluded', I'm less sure on the other two.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Concerning your examples: Afaik the CDDL (ZFS) is considered a free
> >>>>>> software license by the FSF. So I assume this should be fine.
> >>>>>> The nVidia bits are probably not allowed.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> OpenZFS has not been allowed per Red Hat Legal, so I don't think you
> >>>>> can do that.
> >>>>
> >>>> Well, as I said: I'm not a lawyer :)
> >>>> But good to know, thanks!
> >>>>
> >>>> Does this mean that legally the same restrictions that apply to getting
> >>>> a package into RHEL also apply to packages provided by a CentOS SIG?
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> Yes.
> >>
> >> Do you know if OpenAFS would also be excluded from this SIG? We
> >> currently build the kmods ourselves for each kernel release but we would
> >> love to be able to push that upstream.
> >>
> >
> > Unfortunately, yes. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#IBMPL
>
> According to your link I assume you want to imply that only GPL (v2)
> compatible licenses are allowed?
>
> I also looked up what Fedora considers a "good" license for packaging:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main?rd=Licensing#Good_Licenses
>
> These two lists are quite different.
>
>
> Not trying to imply that you are wrong, just trying to figure out what I
> should write in the proposal.
>
> Can someone maybe contact legal to have an "official" answer what
> license requirements we have to adhere to for packaging within a CentOS
> SIG? Or is "GPL v2 compatible" the official answer?
>
> Once we have an answer, it'd be good to add this to the CentOS Wiki.
> Currently there is only vague information there about licensing
> concerning packaging. Or at least I couldn't find it there.
>

The Linux kernel is licensed GPLv2, so all kernel modules need to be
compatible with that license.



-- 
真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!


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