* Re: Acceptance of proprietary kernel modules
2013-08-30 14:35 Acceptance of proprietary kernel modules Richard Weinberger
2013-08-30 21:32 ` Greg KH
@ 2013-09-04 8:37 ` Rob Landley
1 sibling, 0 replies; 3+ messages in thread
From: Rob Landley @ 2013-09-04 8:37 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Richard Weinberger; +Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
On 08/30/2013 09:35:18 AM, Richard Weinberger wrote:
> Hi,
>
> over the last months I've reviewed lot's of Linux based products,
> mostly networking related
> devices like firewalls, WiFi access points, DSL routers, IPMI, etc...
> The vast majority of them had proprietary kernel modules loaded.
> I'm not talking about single self contained device drivers. In the
> wild you'll find whole kernel
> subsystems such as complete firewalling stacks, deep packet
> inspection, IPsec implementations, anti virus scanners, network
> introduction detection systems (yes, in kernel!),
> protocol implementations like MPLS, in-kernel VNC servers, and so on
> as proprietary kernel modules.
>
> Of course, all of them use EXPORT_SYMBOL() symbols only, but nobody
> can tell me that
> these modules are self contained and not a derived work of the kernel.
> One vendor even applied a patch on the kernel which did a
> s/EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL/ EXPORT_SYMBOL/g on a few files, but that's a
> different story.
> Reading the disassembly of said modules showed that most of them are
> clearly designed to run only on Linux. (e.g. every single function
> references a random Linux kernel symbol).
> It's not like NVIDIA's GPU driver which clearly is designed to work
> on many operating systems and Linux is one of that.
> I have the feeling that such doubtful modules are no longer isolated
> cases, they are the common case.
>
> This leads me to one question.
> Have we reached a state where proprietary kernel modules are just
> accepted and nobody cares?
I don't speak for the linux kernel, but:
1) I started the first GPL enforcement suits on behalf of the busybox
project (both through the SFLC and another suit in europe suit along
with gpl-violations.org and FSF europe against some french company),
and I spent over a year pursuing them, resulting in exactly zero lines
of code being added to busybox from any of the companies we sued.
2) I'm giving a talk about the rise and fall of the copyleft at Ohio
LinuxFest later this month. (We have a "greying of fandom" problem
where almost nobody under 30 really seems to care about copyleft, and
the most common license on github is "no license specified".)
3) I touched on this topic in my ELC talk in February, maybe 5 minutes
starting at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s
(Google broke youtube's time link syntax recently, but that's 15
minutes and 9 seconds into the talk. You'll probably have to advance by
hand.)
The short version is: people who aren't in a position to do anything
about it care very deeply in a fairly useless way. People with
nontrivial standing are too busy with programming to spend time on
lawsuits, pretty much by definition. After 20 years, don't expect
sudden change unless somebody retires from programming to file lawsuits
instead, and when they do expect them to burn out after about a year or
two with nothing to show for it except maybe some money.
Sometimes "care in a deep but useless way" and "too busy to do anything
about it" overlaps. Greg KH declared kernel modules flatly illegal in
2006:
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/ols_2006_keynote.html
And you can see how many suits he's filed over the past 8 years to
enforce that view...
What I found out experimentally is that when you _do_ pursue this
stuff, the actual pragmatic payoff to the project, in engineering
terms, is exactly zero.
Think about the fact that the guy who wrote Squashfs spent seven years
trying to get the code in, had it in every major distro but not
vanilla, and still had to take a YEAR off from work to volunteer full
time to finally get it merged into Linus's tree. (And yet somehow, he
still didn't qualify for the recent "call for hobbyists" at the private
invitation-only kernel summit.) He wrote about that here:
https://lwn.net/Articles/563578/
Think about Android too: an enormous chunk of divergent crap with
source dropped along with each release, which spent years outside the
kernel before the kernel guys even figured out what they wanted to _do_
with it, and then they wound up rewriting most of it along different
design lines, and _still_ dealing with the backlog. (Android was fully
in compliance with the GPL every step of the way, even provided source
repositories with history rather than "one big tarball, guess what to
diff this against". And yet...)
If that's what it takes to get large chunks of widely used code
upstream, with the active participation of the people who wrote it, the
likelihood of any of the code you're talking about ever going into
vanilla if it _was_ released (let alone as the result of a lawsuit) is
essentially zero. And the companies behind it know it. And the kernel
guys know it too. There's some posturing and chest beating, but a
couple decades of precedent have made that pretty widely ignored, as
you've noticed.
What the kernel being GPL really meant that Apple, Sun, Oracle, and IBM
couldn't fork the whole thing to produce a large proprietary OS based
on it. (That _would_ get a response from Red Hat and such, in the form
of stop ship injunction with no questions about standing and what is
and isn't a derived work. Of course it took IBM a decade to swat down a
clearly insane SCO that had no actual case thanks to cash infusions
from Sun and Microsoft to pay the lawyers, but "give us the code and
clear title to use it" is a different bar from "yank your product off
the shelves and keep it off indefinitely".) Thus MacOS X is FreeBSD
instead, OpenSolaris... happened, and Oratroll bought its' corpse
(while still doing their Red Hat fork), and IBM keeps AIX limping along
while also doing Linux (and other systems). Meanwhile android gives us
abandonware forks of stale versions after the vendors have preinstalled
the locked down images, so 0.01% of the userbase has the option of
doing cyanogenmod because nobody's ever done a jailbreak on an iPhone.
Another thing it meant is Apple couldn't hire Alan Cox away to work on
a proprietary fork of Linux they way they hired Jordan Hubbard away to
work on the proprietary fork of FreeBSD that became MacOS X. That said
Gentoo's founder Daniel Robbins did spend a year at Microsoft to pay
off some debts, and gentoo's never really recovered the momentum it had
before that. (When Daniel got back they didn't like his smell and
pushed him out of the nest.) Maybe somebody could have hired Philip
Lougher away to work on a proprietary squashfs, but by the time it
really came up the code was out there and in every major distro and
there wasn't much proprietary advantage in having another one.
Cracking down on GPL enforcement is a lot like cracking down on
software piracy: it works best as a cross between a threat and a guilt
trip, but _actual_ enforcement tends to do more harm than good. So you
have the "don't copy that floppy" crowd preaching fire and brimstone
from the pulpit, with only occasional jackbooted thugs kicking down
doors (usually as a sign of cluelessness [my response to the busybox
"hall of shame" I inherited] or desperation [the FSF's ongoing struggle
with irrelevance]; might be some wounded pride in there too at some
point but so far that's just led to posturing, not action).
All this is specific to the kernel, by the way. In userspace the FSF
mortally wounded copyleft by fragmenting it. There's no such thing as
"The GPL" anymore: the kernel's cifs client driver and Samba's cifs
server can't share code even though they implement two ends of the same
protocol and both are licensed under versions of the GPL. QEMU is
caught in the middle of this wanting to take driver code from linux for
device emulation and from binutils/gdb for processor emulation and it
literally _can't_ because they're incompatible GPL versions. (And
saying "make your project GPLv2 or later" just makes it worse because
then you can't accept code from _either_ source.)
For 17 years, "the GPL" was a terminal node in a directed graph of
license convertibility that allowed developers to be lazy, we could all
learn _one_ set of license terms in as much detail as we needed and
treat everything GPL compatible as a single license and everything else
as uninteresting. We didn't have to be lawyers, we could spend our time
coding! But now it's split into incompatible camps even before you
mention "affero" or trying to use creative commons for source code to
get away from the problem. Once you figure out that naieve solutions
like "make your project GPLv2 or later" mean you can't accept code from
either one, and looking for alternate licenses just increases
fragmentation in the copyleft space, the inescapable conclusion is that
the practical effect of copyleft is now to PREVENT code reuse.
We all mocked Sun for introducing the CDDL for OpenSolaris (a non-GPL
copyleft license, whose explicit goal was to prevent Linux and Solaris
from being able to use each other's code), and then the FSF did CDDL2
and switched all the projects they controlled, and split copyleft right
down the middle. (Bravo, FSF. Bravo.)
In the absence of a universal receiver, the under-30 crowd has largely
switched over to universal donor, mostly jumping _past_ BSD to outright
public domain. That way they can give code to anybody, but can only
_take_ code that's been very carefully vetted. (Which is about as much
of a bother as Linux's signed-off-by chain of custody stuff; copyleft
has no advantage here anymore.) Or just have an excuse for the natural
"not invented here" to reinvent a lot of light bulbs until there's a
public domain version of everything.
And explicitly _saying_ "public domain" (ala 7zip or libtomcrypt) is
the _good_ outcome. The bad outcome is when they take a napster
approach of civil disobedience lumping software copyrights and software
patents together as "too broken to live" and just refusing to
participate (here's the code, I refuse to specify a license; Dan
Bernstein was ahead of his time it seems) until the whole diseased
edifice collapses. Which is kinda annoying for those of us trying to
cope in the meantime, but "no license specified" remains the most
popular license on github...
So yeah, you'll find some people over the age of 40 who plan to enforce
their faction of the GPL in court the same way they plan to write the
great american novel someday. It's a thing they'll regret not having
done on their deathbed, and don't expect much action before then unless
it's a midlife crisis thing. You might also find some corporations who
can gain a temporary strategic advantage by filing a hot coffee lawsuit
against their neighbors (see "the ongoing smartphone patent
hellscape"), but the recipient of said lawsuit can have two teams on
two continents do a shim layer and a plugin for that shim layer with a
clean room between 'em if they really want to, and fighting _that_
means we're on the side of IBM vs Compaq back in 1984 saying the
original PC should never have been cloned... Again, a threat followed
through just often enough to keep it alive _as_ a threat, or maybe used
punitively for unrelated strategic reasons.
But what you noticed at the start of this is 20 years of it basically
not happening, with no immediate reason for that to change, and all the
historical success stories from OpenWRT to the new exfat thing _not_
involving lawsuits. (There were threats of using a stick, but it's the
carrot that made 'em all move.)
Rob
(P.S. Reverse engineering hardware support isn't actually very hard.
Noveau, forcedeth, various ATI drivers... The kernel guys actually
don't _want_ code, they want hardware documentation so they can write
their own darn drivers. The crap drivers most vendors produce are only
interesting in that you can use it to reverse engineer a spec to write
new code from, and it's not _that_ much harder to do that from the
binary, especially now we've got kvm and can pass through individual
devices and monitor the interaction with 'em...)
(P.P.S. Yeah, I blathered on at length. I _said_ I'm preparing a talk
on all this stuff. Head full of random tangents from research, trying
to edit it down to a coherent story that fits in 45 minutes...)
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