[WastingMyTime89]

The kernel community has never been particularly interested in the whole free vs open source software debate. The leadership is mostly pragmatic people.

It’s just that Linux used GCC extensions and no one was interested in doing the work necessary to have it compile on a non-GCC compiler.

[wang_li]

That's plainly not true as there are plenty of intra-kernel interfaces that are tagged as GPL only and if your kernel module isn't GPL you can't use said interfaces. For example, they added the GPL tag to the floating point context switch functions which broke ZFS at the time.

[WastingMyTime89]

I don’t understand your comment. The kernel cares about its license which is indeed the GPL, yes.

But Linux didn’t go out of its way to be incompatible with ZFS out of ideology. Sun intentionally picked a license which would not be compatible. That’s why ZFS lives outside of the main tree.

The ideology that’s driving the Linux kernel development: “shared source code leads to better code, user land should never be broken” are very different from the one that led to GCC gimping itself. Generally speaking the kernel community is very technically oriented and doesn’t go out of its way to prevent things for social reasons.

[wang_li]

The kernel devs went out of their way to label a whole bunch of kernel functions as GPL only. It's not about mainlining third party kernel modules, it's about not letting non-GPLed modules use certain functions in the kernel. This includes the fully open source OpenZFS project. It's not about CDDL / GPL incompatibilities. For OpenZFS it was some FPU context switching functions that had to be worked around when the kernel team labelled those functions as GPL only.

See: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/13042

[WastingMyTime89]

You seem confused. There is no mysterious GPL only label in the kernel. The whole thing is licensed under the GPL v2 period. It’s just that some ABI were broken for an unrelated reason as Linux doesn’t guaranty ABI stability and OpenZFS can’t find an alternative which satisfy their dependency needs. The kernel team doesn’t care about out of tree code when making changes. It has always been the rule.

[palunon]

> There is no mysterious GPL only label in the kernel

EXPORT_GPL_ONLY

[WastingMyTime89]

Yes, you are right. I didn’t know the API was tagged. My take seems indeed a bit too extreme.

The kernel does care about enforcing the GPL explicitly on some of the interface it presents to modules to ensure the openness of the code which is indeed a form of statement in favour of open code.

I don’t think the situation was the same regarding compiling only with GCC - after all clang is free software - and I think the heart of my argument still hold: the kernel community makes decisions mostly for reason related to the kernel - even there they just want to force code to be mainlined - rather than for the movement like the FSS.

[peoplefromibiza]

> The kernel community has never been particularly interested in the whole free vs open source software debate

that's total BS

are you telling me that Alan Cox had no involvement in the Free Software?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cox_(computer_programmer)

> It’s just that Linux used GCC extensions and no one was interested in doing the work necessary to have it compile on a non-GCC compiler.

the GCC extensions were essential to enforce the GCC supremacy because no other non-free compiler could implement them

[WastingMyTime89]

> are you telling me that Alan Cox had no involvement in the Free Software?

I don’t see how your statement contradicts or is even linked to mine.

The kernel community as a whole very much has little interest into the philosophical arguments surrounding open source. Apart from being convinced that sharing code is the best way to develop a kernel they have next to no active involvement in the whole charade.

See for exemple keeping GPL v2, not opposing TIVOisation, disapproving on technical merits but allowing proprietary drivers and binary blobs.

> the GCC extensions were essential to enforce the GCC supremacy because no other non-free compiler could implement them

Linux uses GCC extensions because they are handy and GCC was the compiler everyone used to compile C projects for a long time. It’s not intentionally done to promote GCC on ideological ground, something pretty much no one cares about in the kernel community.

[peoplefromibiza]

> The kernel community as a whole very much has little interest into the philosophical arguments surrounding open source

because they didn't have to.

someone already established that it was the foundation, people like Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Maddog Hall and many (not too many, actually) others.

The "community" for the longest time has been a bunch of people

"is a small and well-defined group: Linus, Maddog Hall, Alan Cox, and somewhere between 6 and 12 others (varying at times)." (Steven Suson, 1999)

"Watch the linux-kernel mailing list. The "Inner Circle" becomes very obvious. People go in and out of the Circle, so a list probably isn't possible [...] I would say it includes may be 2 dozen people." (Eric Princen, 1999)

> It’s not intentionally done to promote GCC on ideological ground, something pretty much no one cares about in the kernel community.

again: you're talking at the present, I am talking about the first two decades

you may have forgotten about it, I did not.

[WastingMyTime89]

Torvalds was never a free software zealot in the way the FSS views the movement. He seems to believe open code leads to better code but I don’t think he is against the idea of closed source. He has worked on closed source software himself if I’m not mistaken.

[peoplefromibiza]

> Torvalds was never a free software zealot in the way the FSS views the movement

Who said anything about zealots?

please, stop putting words in someone else's mouth.

Linus was a big supporter of free software and the fact that the Linux kernel was free software is what compelled many developers to donate their work for free

They didn't do it to improve NT Kernel or Solaris kernel or... you know it.

---

Software is like sex: it's better when it's free.

-- Linus Torvalds