From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Wed, 26 Sep 2001 18:12:49 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Wed, 26 Sep 2001 18:12:40 -0400 Received: from mithra.wirex.com ([65.102.14.2]:15368 "HELO mail.wirex.com") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id ; Wed, 26 Sep 2001 18:12:21 -0400 Message-ID: <3BB252BA.9080204@wirex.com> Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 15:12:10 -0700 From: Crispin Cowan Organization: WireX Communications, Inc. User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010726 Netscape6/6.1 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: David Weinehall Cc: Greg KH , Alan Cox , linux-security-module@wirex.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Binary only module overview In-Reply-To: <3BB10E8E.10008@wirex.com> <20010925202417.A16558@kroah.com> <3BB229D1.10401@wirex.com> <20010926233712.H968@khan.acc.umu.se> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org David Weinehall wrote: >On Wed, Sep 26, 2001 at 12:17:37PM -0700, Crispin Cowan wrote: > >>That is not clear to me. I have been unable to find a definitive >>reference that states that is the case. If so, it is problematic, >>because then every user-land program that ever #include'd errno.h from >>glibc is GPL'd, because glibc #include's errno.h, among other GPL'd >>kernel header files. Are you sure you want to declare nearly all >>proprietary Linux applications to be in violation of the GPL? >> >AFAIK, the glibc (and most other libraries) are LGPL rather than GPL. > It appears that while glibc is LGPL, it in turn #include's stuff from the kernel. It more or less has to; otherwise glibc has to guess the format of data structures the kernel is going to export. Greg is partially correct that this is a licensing issue that the glibc maintainers need to resolve. However, I am not convinced that they can resolve it on their own. I see only the following possible resolutions: * we all decide (an opinion) that #include some_gpl.h does not GPL the code doing the including * glibc changes its license to GPL, which would make it unpopular among proprietary application developers * Linux maintainers decide to change the license on the relevant header files to LGPL If one of the above does not happen, then I think I can derive "false" :-) Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc. http://wirex.com Security Hardened Linux Distribution: http://immunix.org Available for purchase: http://wirex.com/Products/Immunix/purchase.html