Re: Tainted Modules Help Notices

[Andreas Dilger <adilger@turbolabs.com>]

On Oct 11, 2001  01:02 +0200, Juan Quintela wrote:
> >>>>> "alan" == Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> writes:
> alan> Well under the DMCA thats probably a criminal offence with five years in
> alan> jail. The truth however is that if you want to lie about licensing or
> alan> run a modutils that doesn't do it nobody stops you. Its there primarily
> alan> to deal with bug filtering from people who don't know better. Folks who
> alan> know enough to subvert the mechanism generally also know better than to
> alan> post Nvdriver bugs to l/k.
> 
> Never understimate the ability of users to subert that kind of
> barriers.

Given that "subversion" will only mean editing the text output of ksymoops
to not display the "tainted" flag, I don't see it to be a big barrier to
entry.  If it is in the FAQ (or documented elsewhere) that "if ksymoops
says 'tainted: 1' submit your bug reports only to the vendor" it will be
a small matter to delete that line, and if this is NOT documented anywhere
it will not reduce the number of bug submissions, which was the original
goal.

I don't think we need to be mucking with "GPL vs. BSD" or anything, but
rather "source available or not" as the criterion for a tainted module.
Heaven forbid that using some driver currently in the kernel sources
marks your kernel as tainted, it would make the whole thing useless.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger  \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto,
                 \  would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?"
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/               -- Dogbert