[OpenAFS-devel] License conflict on 1.4.1, Linux 2.6.16 with Xen

[Russ Allbery]

Sidney Cammeresi <sac@cheesecake.org> writes:

> I just installed 1.4.1 onto three machines, two of which are domU Xen
> instances, from the Debian source packages.  The kernel module produced
> by module-assistant failed to load:

>         openafs: Unknown symbol force_evtchn_callback
>         openafs: Unknown symbol xen_features

> These symbols are EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL, and the OpenAFS module says
> MODULE_LICENSE("http://www.openafs.org/dl/license10.html");

> I decided to throw caution to the wind and change the license to
> MODULE_LICENSE("GPL"); This gave me a working kernel module.

> This is mostly an FYI because this is obviously not a proper solution,
> just please don't send the OpenAFS DMCA enforcement lawyers after me.
> :)

Believe me, OpenAFS is not the party in this particular conflict who cares
except insofar as it gets in the way of getting AFS working on the system.

If we could relicense OpenAFS we probably would (most likely to something
BSD-like), but we can't and the chances of ever being able to do so are so
remote as to not be worth talking about, so we have to cope.  Linux kernel
developers tend to slap GPL on interfaces to keep companies from doing
annoying things with binary blobs and don't even think about OpenAFS
(we're not exactly part of a large group of examples).  Sometimes, when
this is pointed out to them, they care enough about OpenAFS to provide the
hooks that we need; sometimes they just point and laugh and life sucks for
us more.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>