Re: Non-GPL export of invalidate_mmap_range

Christoph Hellwig
2004-02-19T12:31:10Z

On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 04:28:58PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> OK, so I looked at the wrapper. It wasn't a tremendously pleasant
> experience. It is huge, and uses fairly standard-looking filesytem
> interfaces and locking primitives. Also some awareness of NFSV4 for some
> reason.

And pokes deep into internal structures that it shouldn't.

> Still, the wrapper is GPL so this is not relevant.

It's BSD licensed - they couldn't distribute it together with GPFS if
it was GPL.

> Its only use is to tell
> us whether or not the non-GPL bits are "derived" from Linux, and it
> doesn't do that.

Well, something that needs an almost one megabyte big wrapper per defintion
is not a standalone work but something that's deeply interwinded with
the kernel. The tons of kernel version checks certainly show it's poking
deeper than it should.

> Why do you believe that GPFS represents a kernel licensing violation?

See above. Something that pokes deep into internal structures and even
needs new exports certainly is a derived work. There's a few different
interpretations of the derived works clause in the GPL around, the FSF
one wouldn't allow binary modules at all, and Linus' one is also pretty
strict.