RE: [PATCH] Blacklist binary-only modules lying about their license

Hua Zhong
2004-04-30T19:39:49Z

My last email on this topic. If it weren't Linus I would have stopped. :-)

> What is so hard to understand about the problem with bugs?
>
> All software has bugs. Binary modules just mean that those bugs are
> - FATAL to the system, including possibly being a huge security hole.
> - impossible to debug
> - impossible to fix

It's the user's choice to run binary modules on their systems, as long as
the "tainted" issue is not hidden (which I clearly said was wrong) so the
support burden is directed to the right company/person who will hopefully
fix those bugs, why should it concern kernel developers so much? Let the
user have a choice. A working computer which occasionally crashes is still
better to the user than a stable computer which doesn't do the job.

In this sense, it doesn't matter it's a bug in user space or kernel space,
or hard or easy to fix, as long as it doesn't cause much extra burden to the
community.

All I try to say is about the business model of supporting closed-source
drivers by a GPL'ed wrapper. It may not be perfect in an imperfect world,
but nothing to criticize on.

> So don't bother trying to stand up for Linuxant. What they
> did was WRONG, and there are no excuses for it. And I hope
> that they have it fixed already and we can hereby just forget
> about this discussion.

You don't need to tell me why it was wrong, because I already said it was
wrong. :-) I'm not standing up for linuxant either - I am not their
customers and I hardly heard of this name before. I'm just standing up for a
generic issue (which is often silly).

And I agree we should stop this thread now.

> Linus
>