It's rather scary that ppl working w/ GPL sw like yourself see "selecting only customers who silently agree to waive GPL rights" as legal...
Kernel developers are lax over inconsequential infringements like missing changelogs, wrong way of conveying src, unmodified use, etc...
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No one has sued NVIDIA and other companies producing binary drivers for infringement, even Linux-only ones that are clearly derivatives.
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And grsecurity is not even that. It's not a binary. It's a patch, distributed to customer and applied to kernel sources for their builds.
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Can source code even be considered to infringe upon the GPL until it's actually built, linked or run? In that case customer is violating it.
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Linux kernel developers would need to sue grsecurity customers building and using infringing kernels, not even grsecurity itself.
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If grsec is leading their customers to believe they can't safely exercise their rights under GPL, then grsec is infringing.
End of conversation
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I don't think that means you should expect them to tolerate production of a commercial closed-source derived work...
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...especially by a party they have a long history of hostility with.
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It's not closed source. Customers buy the source code. They don't purchase binaries. Public vs. non-public is irrelevant to the GPL.
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GPL doesn't require publicly publishing source code, but rather giving it to customers under the terms of the GPL. That's the *product*.
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The product is not a kernel build. It's the grsecurity patch, applied by the customer to their kernels and run on their servers.
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The users with rights granted by the GPL are the grsecurity customers, who are purchasing the patches to apply to their kernels.
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Even if the patches were not GPL compatible (and they are), is it infringement to distribute them as source code or only to build/run them?
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Is ZFS on Linux infringing on the GPL simply by publishing the sources, or the infringement (if any) when users build and run that code?
End of conversation
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