Subject: Re: incorrect taint of ndiswrapper
Newsgroups: gmane.linux.kernel
Date: 2006-10-26 03:59:23 GMT (1 year, 29 weeks, 6 hours and 55 minutes ago)
> On Wed, 25 Oct 2006 21:30:26 +0100 Alan Cox <alan <at> lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote: > Ar Mer, 2006-10-25 am 16:11 -0400, ysgrifennodd Pavel Roskin: > > I don't see any legal reasons behind this restriction. A driver under > > GPL should be able to use any exported symbols. EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL is a > > technical mechanism of enforcing GPL against non-free code, but > > ndiswrapper is free. The non-free NDIS drivers are not using those > > symbols. > > The combination of GPL wrapper and the NDIS driver as a work is not free > (in fact its questionable if its even legal to ship such a combination > together). May be so. But this patch was supposed to print a helpful taint message to draw our attention to the fact that ndis-wrapper was in use. The patch was not intended to cause gpl'ed modules to stop loading (or if is was, that effect was concealed from yours truly). IOW, this was a mistake. Now, if we do want to disallow gpl module loading after ndis-wrapper has been used then fine, we can discuss that. If we decide to proceed that way then we will probably cause a load of ndis-wrapper to emit a scary printk for six months or so to give people time to make arrangements.