On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 12:31:10PM +0000, Christoph Hellwig wrote:

On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 04:28:58PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:

quoted

OK, so I looked at the wrapper.  It wasn't a tremendously pleasant
experience.  It is huge, and uses fairly standard-looking filesytem
interfaces and locking primitives.  Also some awareness of NFSV4 for some
reason.

And pokes deep into internal structures that it shouldn't.

Again, the point of the patch is to get rid of such poking.

quoted

Still, the wrapper is GPL so this is not relevant.

It's BSD licensed - they couldn't distribute it together with GPFS if
it was GPL.

Yep.

quoted

Its only use is to tell
us whether or not the non-GPL bits are "derived" from Linux, and it
doesn't do that.

Well, something that needs an almost one megabyte big wrapper per defintion
is not a standalone work but something that's deeply interwinded with
the kernel.  The tons of kernel version checks certainly show it's poking
deeper than it should.

On the size, I beg to differ.  One of the reasons the glue module is
so large is because of the fact that GPFS was written to run in an AIX
kernel rather than a Linux kernel.  I would guess that if GPFS had
been instead been derived from Linux, the glue module would be much
smaller.  On the kernel version checks, the point of the patch is
to get rid of at least some of these.

quoted

Why do you believe that GPFS represents a kernel licensing violation?

See above.  Something that pokes deep into internal structures and even
needs new exports certainly is a derived work.  There's a few different
interpretations of the derived works clause in the GPL around, the FSF
one wouldn't allow binary modules at all, and Linus' one is also pretty
strict.

So why are you coming out against something that you seem to believe
allows -better- alignment with Linus's rules?

						Thanx, Paul
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