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Comment by rciorba | Hacker News Reader

From the article: "LVE stands for Lightweight Virtual Environments, a proprietary technology from CloudLinux."

I'm confused about the proprietary bit. As far as I can find they released a kernel module in the past that was in violation of the GPL but then redressed the issue by releasing the sources under the GPL. Does anyone know what the current state is?

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The GPL only requires you to distribute the source if you distribute the binary. It does not require to open the source if you built something you're only using internally. So while distributing the binary kernel module without the source would be a violation of the GPL, just using it internally on your own servers would not be.

(IANAL, ...)

They (cloudlinux) do distribute the binary.

and, as noted, the source as well.

Somebody important seems unconvinced: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/kernel/module....

This was done when we initially (several years ago), by mistake licensed our module as GPL without releasing the source. Took us one or two weeks to see if we have any other legal concerns to release the sources, and then released it. We did release all the sources back then, and continue to release sources each time we update module. We really never went around / removing that code -- because honestly speaking we couldn't care less. Our module wouldn't work without our kernel anyway, and in our kernel it is easy to remove :) And for those who care / want to use our kernel/module for other reasons, great -- they can work with mainstream to remove this. Basically -- this is just a dead code.

Or, depending on the version of the GPL, if you make service that you let the public access

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html

We release our kernel & modules as GPL. We are fully GPL compliant.

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