* Jiri Kosina <jikos@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, 2 May 2019, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote: > > > Please don't start this. We have everything _GPL that is used for FPU > > related code and only a few functions are exported because KVM needs it. > > That's not completely true. There are a lot of static inlines out there, > which basically made it possible for external modules to use FPU (in some > way) when they had kernel_fpu_[begin|end]() available. > > I personally don't care about ZFS a tiny little bit; but in general, the > current situation with _GPL and non-_GPL exports is simply not nice. It's > not really about licensing (despite the name), it's about 'internal vs > external', which noone is probably able to define properly. But that's exactly what licensing *IS* about: the argument is that 'internal' interfaces are clear proof that the binary module is actually a derived work of the kernel. (Using regular exported symbols might still make a binary module derived work, but it's less clear-cut.) So don't be complicit with binary module authors who try to circumvent the GPL by offloading the actual license violation to the end user ... > If it would be strictly about license compatibility, that'd at least > make us somewhat deterministic. License compatibility is rarely deterministic to begin with, there's a lot of grey area. Adding _GPL increases the likelihood that the module using it has to be covered by the GPL too. In fact behavior of binary modules seems to confirm that legal expectation: very few binary modules are trying to circumvent _GPL symbols by ignoring the _GPL attribute. Anyway, in terms of _GPL exports the policy has always been that if a major author of the code asks for a symbol to be _GPL, then it should be so, even if other authors have a different judgement. Thanks, Ingo
