Hello,
Am 14.11.24 um 12:14 schrieb Uwe Kleine-König:
Hello,
On 11/14/24 11:49, Werner Sembach wrote:
Am 14.11.24 um 11:31 schrieb Uwe Kleine-König:
the kernel modules provided by Tuxedo on
https://gitlab.com/tuxedocomputers/development/packages/tuxedo-drivers
are licensed under GPLv3 or later. This is incompatible with the
kernel's license and so makes it impossible for distributions and other
third parties to support these at least in pre-compiled form and so
limits user experience and the possibilities to work on mainlining these
drivers.
This incompatibility is created on purpose to control the upstream
process. See https://fosstodon.org/@kernellogger/113423314337991594 for
a nice summary of the situation and some further links about the issue.
Note that the pull request that fixed the MODULE_LICENSE invocations to
stop claiming GPL(v2) compatibility was accepted and then immediately
reverted "for the time being until the legal stuff is sorted out"
(https://gitlab.com/tuxedocomputers/development/packages/tuxedo-
drivers/-/commit/a8c09b6c2ce6393fe39d8652d133af9f06cfb427).
As already being implied by that commit message, this is sadly not an issue
that can be sorted out over night.
We ended up in this situation as MODULE_LICENSE("GPL") on its own does not
hint at GPL v2, if one is not aware of the license definition table in the
documentation.
That statement isn't consistent with you saying to pick GPLv3 as an explicitly
incompatible license to control the mainlining process. So you knew that it's
legally at least questionable to combine these licenses.
Put in the time-dimension and you can figure out where this isn't inconsistent.
The only thing I could accept here is that you were surprised that the
incompatibility has some technical enforcement resulting in your modules to
become nonfunctional. But that's like a thieve in a supermarket who asks for
forgiveness because while he was aware that steeling is not allowed, wasn't
aware there is video surveillance that might actually catch him.
So I'd claim MODULE_LICENSE("GPL") not being explicit to not apply for GPLv3
code is not a valid excuse. (Which doesn't mean the kernel couldn't improve
here.)
I can not tell anything else than I wrote above so I probably can't gain your
trust that it was an honest mistake.
Thing is we are working on rewriting the driver bit by bit directly for upstream
under GPL v2, e.g.
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20241001180658.76396-2-wse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
And we don't stop anyone else from doing so and actively involve ourself in the
process, giving advice where we can from our experience with the devices, e.g.
https://github.com/Wer-Wolf/uniwill-laptop/issues/1
And tuxedo-drivers got code in the past from external contributors under GPL v3
that also weren't aware of the correct definition of MODULE_LICENSE("GPL") which
needs to be sorted out.
And no tuxedo-drivers module would get accepted upstream as is at the moment,
because the focus of the driver package is mainly to get support for new devices
out as quickly as possible, while upstream rightfully has way stricter
guidelines on code quality (not implying that tuxedo-drivers has bad code
quality, it's a spectrum after all).
What I want to say: If the end goal is upstream support for our devices nothing
is speed up by the relicensing, arguably it's slowed down because someone now
has to sort out legal stuff. If you want to take on the actual coding work
yourself, please do so, I will give you advice as I did with Armins uniwill
laptop driver and several times on the mailing list.
Kind regards,
Werner Sembach
Best regards
Uwe
