Re: 2.6.0-test10-mm1

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 04:42:51AM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > The individual patches in the broken-out/ directory are usually
> > changelogged.  This one says:
> > 
> >   It was EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(), however IBM's GPFS is not GPL.
> > 
> >   - the GPFS team contributed to the testing and development of
> >     invaldiate_mmap_range().
> > 
> >   - GPFS was developed under AIX and was ported to Linux, and hence meets
> >     Linus's "some binary modules are OK" exemption.
> > 
> >   - The export makes sense: clustering filesystems need it for shootdowns to
> >     ensure cache coherency.
> 
> Have you actually looked at the gpfs glue code?

Nope.

> something that digs that deep
> into the VM and VFS actually _must_ be derived work.

Could be.  I'm surprised that they need a glue layer at all actually.

> Or do wed allow people
> now to pay a developer tax to buy themselves free from GPL restrictions.

Well I think that restructuring the pagecache invalidaton in such a way
that it is useful for non-derived clustered filesytems does give one some
rights to actually use that code.  It seems a bit rude to take the code but
to make it unusable.

> I as one of the collective copytight holders of the kernel strongly disagree
> with that, it can't be true that IBM can just ignore copyright law..

Well if people have problems with it then I don't feel strongly enough
about it to dispute that, frankly.

But I do not think that making a single kernel symbol inaccessible is an
appropriate way of resolving a GPFS licensing dispute.
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