On Wednesday, 13 בDecember 2006 11:30, Ira Abramov wrote:
> the company in question (and those of you who know who they are, know),
> Has promissed me to solve the issue. the problem was a proprietary
> kernel module that should have tainted the kernel and recieved a
> restricted set of symbols, but instead has a license string of "GPL is
> not the license of this module" with a null character after the "GPL",
> which is an ugly and unethical hack.
LinuxAnt did this circa 2004. It was trivial to patch the
MODULE_LICENSE() macro so it would detect this (several patches
were sent by people including Linus).
IIRC the general feeling was that an "arms-race" with drivers
that try to hack the kernel GPL tests are not the right course of
action and these patches were not applied.
However, if you want to stress how stupid this hack is, you may
want to clarify to these people several facts:
- Putting this string in the module is a public proof that the
company *deliberately* missrepresented their license.
AFAIK, this in itself is a criminal offense in many countries.
- If the copyright dispute ever get to court, there are usually
big difference in penalties for "willfull infringement" vs.
unknowingly infringement (I think in the US it's triple damages
and up to 5 years in prison).
"... Oh sir, we didn't know we had any problem with the GPL string,
we normally put NULL in our strings every 3'rd charater..."
- At least in the US, trying to circumvent the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL
may trigger the ugly DMCA, only this time it would work for
free software instead of against it. Your clients may want
to be informed that at least one foreign programmer was arrested
and held in a US prison for 1.5 months because of claims about DMCA
infringement raised against his (foreign) employer.
Cheers,
--
Oron Peled Voice/Fax: +972-4-8228492
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.actcom.co.il/~oron
ICQ UIN: 16527398
"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
-- Alan Kay
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