Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/9] use network namespace for iSCSI control interfaces

From: [email-masked] (Eric W. Biederman)
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2017 13:46:03 -0600

David Laight <[email-masked]> writes:

> To make matters even more annoying the functions for holding and
> releasing a namespace are GPL_ONLY :-(

I am going to pick on this by itself for a moment without mentioning
anything else, so as hopefully not to derail what otherwise sounds
like a good technical conversation.

So far every time when someone has complained to me about things being
GPL_ONLY and I have looked into it, all I have seen is someone trying
to come up with a way to release derivative works of the kernel without
honoring the terms of the GPLv2.

I read through the US Code a while back to see if I could understand
what is legaly defined as a derivative work, and my impression at the
time was that the FSF is quite conservative in what they consider a
derivative work, and probably the scope is much wider.

So when people start complaining about things being GPLv2 those are the
most annoying bug reports I ever deal with, as almost invariably people
just want to take from the community and don't want to work with every
one else.

It is especially annoying because I have never seen a case where there
is a good justification for a kernel export being anything other than
GPL_ONLY.  That is the kernel's license after all, and if you are using
kernel internal functions the chance that your code is not a derivative
work is about 0.

Eric