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

Tigran Aivazian
2004-04-30T15:12:32Z

On Fri, 30 Apr 2004, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> DriverLoader significantly lowers that cost, while not providing an open
> source solution at all.

Ah, I see.... that makes a HUGE difference. Now I understand what the fuss
is all about. So, that is why everyone jumped on Marc Boucher's throat
trying to annihilate, humiliate, frighten by unsubstantiated allegations
and generally grind him into tiny specks of dust, at the same time falsely
pretending that all the fuss was only about that silly '\0' byte they
left in their license string (I wish they knew better not to do that ---
there are millions of ways to achieve what they want).

Why didn't someone say that from the beginning, that what he (Marc
Boucher's company) is doing was to lower the cost of avoiding to support
the native Linux drivers and that is certainly damaging to us, though we
can't really do anything about it because it is fair and perfectly legal.
In fact, the only thing we can do is to make their life harder (i.e.
by being unfair) and reduce the number of GPL-exported symbols to almost
nothing.

Imho, it is best when people honestly state what the goal and the reasons
of debate are, instead of unacceptable and unfair techniques such as lying
about GPL directory content etc.

I think you (Jeff) have pointed out the key thing and it explained
everything very nicely (at least to me, it did). Thank you. I always found
your emails informative and to the point :)

Kind regards
Tigran