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

Sun May 23 01:31:03 UTC 2021
Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com>

On Sat, May 22, 2021 at 5:51 PM redbaronbrowser via CentOS-devel
<centos-devel at centos.org> wrote:
>
> On Friday, May 21, 2021 8:00 AM, Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > The Linux kernel is licensed GPLv2, so all kernel modules need to be
> > compatible with that license.
>
> If only things were that simple.
>
> The linux kernel actually specifies that it's SPDX-License-Identifier is  GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note
>
> It continues on to explain this exception to the GPL in the license rules for other licenses documentation.  This includes a MODULE_LICENSE() tag for modules to gain or be restricted from EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL().
>
> As far as I can tell, OpenAFS honors the license tag system of the kernel and avoids calling kernel symbols that requires being GPL compatible.  As such, it is compatible with the Linux kernel GPLv2 exception/syscall-note.
>

Your understanding is fundamentally wrong. The Linux-syscall-note
explicitly does not cover the kernel interface, which is what kernel
modules use.

I'm not discussing this further, though. I'm just going to say that
Red Hat Legal has consistently told Fedora this over the years, and I
do not expect this to change for CentOS.



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