Hello Uwe,
Am 16.11.24 um 18:49 schrieb Uwe Kleine-König:
Hello,
On Thu, Nov 14, 2024 at 12:14:16PM +0100, Uwe Kleine-König wrote:
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.
When I wrote this mail I missed the possibility that while Werner knew
GPLv3 isn't ok for in-kernel code might still have considered GPLv3 ok
for external modules anyhow.
So I take back what I said and excuse me for my words. They were not
intended as harsh as Werner obviously took them, but still I regret
having written my reply with this suggestion.
I'm sorry,
Uwe
Thank you very much for these words.
I hope that in my replies I wasn't too harsh from my side and if so, I
too want to apologize for it.
No more bad feelings going forward.
Best regards,
Werner Sembach
