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Bruce Perens argues[1] that this is a penalty for exercising your rights under the GPL and therefore violates section 6[2]: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein"

[1] https://perens.com/2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-c...

[2] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html

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Open Source Security (company behind grsecurity) sued him for that post, but the case got dismissed and looks like OSS has to pay his legal fees:

https://www.digitalmunition.me/maker-of-linux-patch-batch-gr...

He argues contributory infringement and breach of contract, but he really only goes into the breach of contract theory.

I'm more curious about the contributory infringement theory. You cannot have contributory infringement without there being a direct infringement by someone else for the contributory infringer to have contributed to. I don't see offhand who would be the direct infringer whose infringement Grsecurity is contributing to.

The way I'm readying it, his point is that a Grsecurity customer, who is not infringing Linux copyright (because they're not distributing kernels) would still be on the hook for contributory infringement because they contributed to Grsecurity's infringement.

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