i have a lot of doubts about the legality of the grsecurity "commercial GCC plugin" business too
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was Open Source Security Inc. not selling the GCC plugins individually at one point?
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at least web.archive.org/web/2019062517 alludes to the RAP plugin being productized as a commercial standalone product outside of the grsecurity kernel patch.
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i don't think anyone here disagrees that you have the right to cut off people's grsecurity subscriptions if they bundle it with a product and have to abide by their GPL obligations; but building a product from a GPL SDK, in concert with a GPL program is a different question
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I disagree with that. Granting license only with a threat of commercial retaliation if used is not following the gpl's requirement to license under gpl with no further conditions.
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It's not an additional condition for what you already received. I think they distribute everything as source code anyway. The GCC plugins are GPLv2 only and GCC expects plugins to be GPLv3 but that has been inherited as a problem for the upstream plugins in the Linux kernel too.
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There is no problem, you're forgetting about the GCC runtime library exemption: gnu.org/licenses/gcc-e If anyone had a problem with it, they wouldn't be linking to the code on their own site: gcc.gnu.org/wiki/plugins or could just shoot anyone a simple email...
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anytime in oh the past decade? This is all outside misinformed nonsense originating from an obsessed troll, there's never been any substance to it. Nobody cares about facts, just repeating whatever misinformation they heard.
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GPLv2 can't be used as the basis for upstream GCC features and losing the runtime library exception makes them generally unusable for userspace.
It's not necessarily a problem if the goal is simply having plugins that are forever downstream and only usable for the Linux kernel.
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I don't think it's that simple though. That page does say this:
> The availability of this Exception does not imply any general presumption that third-party software is unaffected by the copyleft requirements of the license of GCC.
The details of what's okay don't seem trivial.