You may have kernel contributors within you organization or association;
there is a fairly good chance their copyright is being violated now by
GRSecurity (Brad Spengler and PaX Team) (Since GRSec code snakes through
nearly the entirety of the Linux Kernel code tree). If said copyright is
not defended, it is not far fetched to imagine that more and more
entities will see that there is no teeth to the license grant and
basically will treat your code as if it were BSD licensed. The "payment"
one gets for working on a work licensed under a CopyLeft license is
labor: the derivative works. If that incentive is known to no longer
exist I imagine less people will contribute.
It will become a "good in theory, does no longer work in practice"
situation and Linux will be in the same state as BSD with less
individuals willing to sacrifice their time to donate code to entities
that will never give back.
I don't think it is a good idea to let this one go.
On 2017-06-15 16:02, Neal Gompa wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 11:39 AM, <aconcernedfossdev(a)airmail.cc>
> wrote:
>> Why does no one care that Brad Spengler of GRSecurity is blatantly
>> violating
>> the intention of the rightsholders to the Linux Kernel?
>> He is also violating the license grant, Courts would not be fooled by
>> his
>> scheme to prevent redistribution.
>>
>> The license grant the Linux Kernel is distributed under disallows the
>> imposition of additional terms. The making of an understanding that
>> the
>> derivative work must not be redistributed (lest there be retaliation)
>> is the
>> imposition of an additional term. The communication of this threat is
>> the
>> moment that GRSecurity violates the license grant. Thence-forth
>> modification, making of derivative works, and distribution of such is
>> a
>> violation of the Copyright statute. The concoction of the transparent
>> scheme
>> shows that it is a willful violation, one taken in full knowledge by
>> GRSecurity of the intention of the original grantor.
>>
>>
>> Why does not one person here care?
>> Just want to forget what holds Libre Software together and go the way
>> of
>> BSD?
>>
>>
>> (Note: last month the GRSecurity Team removed the public testing
>> patch,
>> they prevent the distribution of the patch by paying customers by a
>> threat of no further business: they have concocted a transparent
>> scheme
>> to make sure the intention of the Linux rights-holders (thousands of
>> entities) are defeated) (This is unlike RedHat who do distribute their
>> patches in the form the rights-holders prefer: source code, RedHat
>> does
>> not attempt to stymie the redistribution of their derivative works,
>> GRSecurity does.).
>>
>
> Okay, I'll bite. Fedora, as a matter of policy, only ships one kernel
> variant, the upstream kernel. We have never used the PaX/grsec
> patchset as it is fundamentally incompatible with other security
> mechanisms we use in Fedora and breaks userspace without concern. So,
> the whole matter of what PaX/grsec do is pretty much irrelevant to
> Fedora because we never shipped it.
>
> I'm sure there are people who are concerned about this matter, but as
> a project, Fedora is not really involved in that mess.