Re: 2.6.0-test10-mm1

Andrew Morton
2003-11-26T13:29:00Z

Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 04:42:51AM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > The individual patches in the broken-out/ directory are usually
> > changelogged. This one says:
> >
> > It was EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(), however IBM's GPFS is not GPL.
> >
> > - the GPFS team contributed to the testing and development of
> > invaldiate_mmap_range().
> >
> > - GPFS was developed under AIX and was ported to Linux, and hence meets
> > Linus's "some binary modules are OK" exemption.
> >
> > - The export makes sense: clustering filesystems need it for shootdowns to
> > ensure cache coherency.
>
> Have you actually looked at the gpfs glue code?

Nope.

> something that digs that deep
> into the VM and VFS actually _must_ be derived work.

Could be. I'm surprised that they need a glue layer at all actually.

> Or do wed allow people
> now to pay a developer tax to buy themselves free from GPL restrictions.

Well I think that restructuring the pagecache invalidaton in such a way
that it is useful for non-derived clustered filesytems does give one some
rights to actually use that code. It seems a bit rude to take the code but
to make it unusable.

> I as one of the collective copytight holders of the kernel strongly disagree
> with that, it can't be true that IBM can just ignore copyright law..

Well if people have problems with it then I don't feel strongly enough
about it to dispute that, frankly.

But I do not think that making a single kernel symbol inaccessible is an
appropriate way of resolving a GPFS licensing dispute.