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Why would that be pretty bizarre? The entire goal of the GPL was to use copyright law against itself (hence the term copyleft): the stronger copyright law gets, the stronger GPL protection gets. So to me, it's pretty much in the spirit of the GPL to wield additional copyright legislation to protect open source software.

RMS even describes the GPL's weaponizing of copyright against itself as a "judo throw" in his writings. The intent there is very explicit.

RMS also changed GPLv3 to specifically forbid exactly the kind of lawsuit being threatened in the commit message.

Sure - I think there's a hair to be split here where we could argue that weaponizing anti-circumvention logic in GPLv2 is generally in the spirit of the GPL as a whole, but then also say they in GPLv3 we decided to remove it because while it's in the spirit, it's too dangerous, and net-better for user freedom if using GPLv3 software doesn't carry the risk of accidentally tripping up anti-circumvention laws.

I get the impression that GPLv2 is (perhaps unintentionally) in the spirit of open source, whereas GPLv3 is in the spirit of Free Software. Thus Linus's famous "I just want the code" rant.

GPLv2 was created by and for the free software movement. The notion that it is somehow more aligned with a depoliticized, whitewashed ancestor of that movement than it is with the real deal is absurd.

It's absurd, but true. I do think it's unintentional, but due to historical reasons GPLv2 doesn't prevent tivoization, which is more aligned with open source than with free software.

Again, I'm not discussing what the intentions were, nor what the practical effects used to be 20 years ago, I'm referring to it's position today.

Suppose a hypothetical that GPLv2 never existed and that the GPLv3 was written in 1990, then someone came along today and wrote a variant of GPLv3 that specifically permitted tivoization and firmware blobs; surely such a license would be seen as moving from open-source to free software.

Link to Linus' rant please?

https://www.theregister.com/2006/03/10/torvalds_gpl_drm/

I am less familiar with the lawsuit sections of GPLv3; would you mind pointing to the relevant sections?

GPLv3 has the following clause:

>3. Protecting Users' Legal Rights From Anti-Circumvention Law.

>No covered work shall be deemed part of an effective technological measure under any applicable law fulfilling obligations under article 11 of the WIPO copyright treaty adopted on 20 December 1996, or similar laws prohibiting or restricting circumvention of such measures.

>When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.

kernel taint is obviously a DRM scheme, that's not a secret. GPL isn't a permissive license, it's a strong copyleft license that has teeth. there's nothing hypocritical about the taint mechanism - it's open-source, and as long as your code is GPL you can do anything you like. it literally just enforces the linking provision of the GPL license.

> it literally just enforces the linking provision of the GPL license.

Which provision are you referring to? The word "link" is only in one spot in GPL 2.0 and isn't talking about this situation.

But assuming you mean it's just enforcing the text about derived works, that would only be true if the GPL exports were consistently linux-specific enough that using them makes your code a derived work.

Which they blatantly aren't.

> It's pretty bizarre given there are few laws which seem more universally opposed by the open source community, and seems to me quite at odds with the values of FOSS - as is any DRM scheme.

Even if we don't like a law, it's a law, and you live in reality where it applies — and you should use it when needed. I don't find it bizarre at all.

The values of the FOSS community are pro Good. If you do something shady, and they help you save face with a gentle touch like this, you're lucky.

It's a shady workaround to the kernel itself being shady with which symbols get marked GPL.

Marking symbols as GPL is not shady.

For the symbols where use of them does not imply that the code is derivative of the kernel, it is shady.

See also kernel_fpu_begin

Code which links against the kernel is derivative as far as the GPL is concerned.

That's obviously not true when you consider code that was ported from other architectures.

Unless you mean specifically how the GPL is written, but the GPL doesn't get to decide what's derivative, copyright does.

And if that was solidly true, why isn't every symbol marked GPL?

Doesn't the existence of the LGPL negate your argument? It is the GPL with a linking exception, colloquially.

LGPL sets out better, clearer boundaries. And it allows some things that might arguably be derived code, while the GPL would hedge much closer to that line. So it has a use.

Also FSF tends to overstate the importance of linking.

I don't understand what porting from other architectures has to do with anything. If Linux has some code for amd64, and then Linux developers port that code to aarch64, why would the aarch64 code be different from a licensing perspective than the amd64 code?

I don't know why they have non-GPL symbols. My understanding is that they could have marked every symbol as GPL. There's presumably some desire to allow limited closed-source drivers. You'd have to ask someone involved or find some writings from someone who knows. Maybe Google can help.

I'm taking about a kernel module being ported from something other than Linux. With minimal changes.

Changing some entry points won't make it a derived work.

Being open source with GPL2 is a digital right, is it not? DRM is a logical step against GPL piracy.

You're right, it is open source. As such, this doesn't violate user freedom since if Nvidia, the user in this context, don't like this, they can fork the kernel and change the behavior however they want. Of course, nothing compels anyone else to use such a kernel.

Presumably they actually can't, because the forked kernel would still be GPL.

How would the GPL stop them from removing the check? They'd have to share their changed kernel source, but nobody would want it.

The check is just enforcing the legal interpretation of the rights holders, the check code itself doesn't matter legally. Just like how stripping some DRM doesn't mean you now own the copyright to the video.

That raises an interesting question: Is modification of the source that is used to produce the executable software necessarily modification of software from a DMCA perspective? Or does the circumvention have to involve influencing an extant binary in some way? The legal answer, in either direction, isn't obvious to me.

Especially since the GPL license does explicitly allow you to modify the source.

Don't they realize the DMCA has interoperability exceptions for this sort of thing?

> there are few laws which seem more universally opposed by the open source community, and seems to me quite at odds with the values of FOSS - as is any DRM scheme.

My reading is that this is obviously a half-serious and half-sarcastic remark.

The serious message is that the author believes it's a genuine case of copyright violation. The sarcastic message is that - given the context that the bar of invoking DMCA is so low that almost every trivial check can be classified as "anti-circumvention devices" (including the GPL symbol check in the Linux kernel), making it universally opposed by the FOSS community - Thus, the author thought it would be fun to flip the table here to make the exact same legal threat back to proprietary software vendors.

It's simultaneously a copyright infringement accusation, a sarcastic comment on the excessively broad scope of DMCA, and a half-serious revenge in the form of a hypothetical legal threat.

It reminds me of a song about cryptography called Alice and Bob, which made a similar joke. The lyrics read:

> Sending data across the network in a safe way

> Protecting messages to make my pay

> If you hack me you're guilty under the DMCA

The joke of the song is that proprietary software vendors often use DMCA to suppress vulnerability disclosure from security researchers, thus, a security researcher who implements an insecure data encryption protocol can theoretically make use of the same legal threat to cover up their own incompetence - which is absurd from a technical perspective but also the point of the joke.