Zack’s Kernel News

Zack’s Kernel News

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Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.

Licensing Confusion

An interesting little licensing escapade occurred recently. Matthew Garrett noticed that CloudLinux corporation had released their lve kernel driver under a new, proprietary license, whereas before, it had been released under the GPL. Technically, nothing too fishy is going on here because the original author of GPL’d code is still free to release that code under other licenses. But Matthew noticed that, in this particular case, the driver still pretended to the kernel to be a GPL’d driver and still used kernel symbols that were restricted to GPL-only code.