On 29/04/2021, Al Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 02:06:12PM +0000, Mariusz Ceier wrote: > >> > You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or >> > in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, *to >> > be licensed as a whole* at no charge to all third parties under the >> > terms of this License. >> >> >> The issue here is, non-GPL tools enable development and distribution >> of GPL-compatible yet proprietary versions of the kernel, unless I'm >> mistaken. > > And? For your argument to work, we'd need to have the kernel somehow > locked into the use of tools that would have no non-GPL equivalents > *and* would be (somehow) protected from getting such equivalents. > How could that be done, anyway? Undocumented and rapidly changing > features of the tools? We would get screwed by those changes ourselves. > Copyrights on interfaces? Software patents? Some other foulness? > > I honestly wonder about the mental contortions needed to describe > something of that sort as "free", but fortunately we are nowhere > near such situation anyway. > Equivalents are not a problem - they can exist as long as the distributed source would be buildable with GPL tools. I was thinking that adding a requirement that the distributed kernel source should be buildable by GPL tools would be enough to protect it from proprietary extensions. But maybe you're right that this is unrealistic. > I don't like Rust as a language and I'm sceptical about its usefulness > in the kernel, but let's not bring "gcc is better 'cuz GPL" crusades > into that - they are irrelevant anyway, since we demonstrably *not* > locked into gcc on all architectures your hypothetical company would > care about, Rust or no Rust. > I don't mind the language. I'm more concerned about featureful rust compiler suddenly being developed behind closed doors.
