Notices by Linus Torvalds (torvalds@social.kernel.org)

@trashheap The “argument” by the SFC is complete garbage, and always has been. There has been no question about the license, and I have made it very clear over the years. And the SFC knows that.

So when they argue their incorrect reading of the GPLv2 in court, they are absolutely not doing GPLv2 enforcement. They are trying to further an agenda that is invalid, and always has been, and is explicitly against the wishes of the actual copyright holders.

So the SFC is just pure trash.

If they want to “protect” some project, let them protect a project that asks for it - not one that is known to not want their kind of protection.

Because what they are doing is a racket, plain and simple.

@amszmidt I wonder why you think I’m ignoring or mis-reading what the SFC has written and stated? Because I’m sadly very familiar with their statements over the years.

Do you think the California Superior court judge also misread what the SFC stated? Because that judge also found their arguments lacking any basis in reality:

The Plain Language of the Agreements does not Support the Alleged Duty

(where that “Alleged Duty” is the baseless arguments from SFC about being able to re-install on the device).

I think you didn’t actually read the ruling, and you may perhaps have read just the flim-flam garbage that the SFC put out about the completely irrelevant issue of “continuing to function properly” which was what Vizio was using as their reason for not releasing keys.

Put another way: I can read. That superior court judge can read. I think you need to learn to read. And you need to take what the SFC then says in court - and on their blog - with a big pinch of salt.

I realize that other people like the GPLv3 and wish the Linux kernel was under that license. But that is simply not the case, and never has been and never will be.

Deal with reality, not your baseless wishes otherwise.

GPLv2 affirmation…

I don’t generally post here as people have probably noticed, but here’s a pdf of a recent court ruling, and this turns out to be the easiest way for me to link to a copy of it, since I don’t really maintain any web presence normally and I don’t want to post pdf’s to the kernel mailing lists or anything like that.

And the reason I want to post about it, is that it basically validates my long-held views that the GPLv2 is about making source code available, not controlling the access to the hardware that it runs on.

The court case itself is a mess of two bad parties: Vizio and the SFC. Both of them look horribly bad in court - for different reasons.

Vizio used Linux in their TVs without originally making the source code available, and that was obviously not ok.

And the Software Freedom Conservancy then tries to make the argument that the license forces you to make your installation keys etc available, even though that is not the case, and the reason why the kernel is very much GPLv2 only. The people involved know that very well, but have argued otherwise in court.

End result: both parties have acted badly. But at least Vizio did fix their behavior, even if it apparently took this lawsuit to do so. I can’t say the same about the SFC.

Please, SFC - stop using the kernel for your bogus legal arguments where you try to expand the GPLv2 to be something it isn’t. You just look like a bunch of incompetent a**holes.

The only party that looks competent here is the judge, which in this ruling says

Plaintiff contends the phrases, “machine-readable” and “scripts used to control compilation and installation” support their assertion in response to special interrogatory no. 4 that Defendant should “deliver files such that a person of ordinary skill can compile the source code into a functional executable and install it onto the same device, such that all features of the original program are retained, without undue difficulty.”

The language of the Agreements is unambiguous. It does not impose the duty which is the subject of this motion.

Read as a whole, the Agreements require Vizio to make the source code available in such a manner that the source code can be readily obtained and modified by Plaintiff or other third parties. While source code is defined to include “the scripts used to control compilation and installation,” this does not mean that Vizio must allow users to reinstall the software, modified or otherwise, back onto its smart TVs in a manner that preserves all features of the original program and/or ensures the smart TVs continue to function properly. Rather, in the context of the Agreements, the disputed language means that Vizio must provide the source code in a manner that allows the source code to be obtained and revised by Plaintiff or others for use in other applications.

In other words, Vizio must ensure the ability of users to copy, change/modify, and distribute the source code, including using the code in other free programs consistent with the Preamble and Terms and Conditions of the Agreements. However, nothing in the language of the Agreements requires Vizio to allow modified source code to be reinstalled on its devices while ensuring the devices remain operable after the source code is modified. If this was the intent of the Agreements, the Agreements could have been readily modified to state that users must be permitted to modify and reinstall modified software on products which use the program while ensuring the products continue to function. The absence of such language is dispositive and there is no basis to find that such a term was implied here. Therefore, the motion is granted.

IOW, this makes it clear that yes, you have to make source code available, but no, the GPLv2 does not in any way force you to then open up your hardware.

My intention - and the GPLv2 - is clear: the kernel copyright licence covers the software, and does not extend to the hardware it runs on. The same way the kernel copyright license does not extend to user space programs that run on it.

@gregkh @sima “eventually calling __get_free_pages”?

You have to realize that when the GFP_xyz flags were introduced - back in 1992 - “get_free_page()” was the only way to allocate memory.

So “GFP” wasn’t some odd internal thing. There was nothing else (ok, there was a very simply malloc() library on top of that “you can free and allocate one page” mode).

No “eventually” about it. It was the thing.

Some of you know today as π-day.

But the real insiders know that today is the 30th anniversary of the 1.0 release of Linux.

@monsieuricon I think we should do this by default on the security list.

Not for the levity, but just to counteract the “security is more important than anything else” vibes. Security researchers have this “the sky is falling” thing going on for everything, it’s very tiresome.

Being the responsible parents we are, we have Carbon Monoxide alarms in the house, because hey, it’s what you do. Right?

Of course, they have never gone off (knock wood), so you do tend to forget that they exist at all.

Well, yesterday one of those alarms decided that it needed to really remind us that it exists, and that it’s been ten years since we activated it. Because it’s now time to replace it.

Of course, nobody was home - except for the dog. Who is now traumatized by that beeping hell-box that suddenly decided that it was a good idea to tell everybody out of the blue that it needs replacing - at 95dB, just to make sure.

Kidde - I’m sure you could at least start out with just a mild chirp, instead of going full “the bark collar from hell” crazy. No?

Well that didn’t last long.

Do I reset my staycation counter to day one, or do I keep this at day six?

The reason why it’s taking so long is mostly that we’re in a fairly sparsely populated area on the outskirts of town. So not only do we have a lot of these big trees around, PGE also always ends up prioritizing the areas with many more customers affected.

But it doesn’t help that this really is a pretty massive tree, and it has also fallen in a way that makes it hard to remove, with the middle unsupported.

One of our neighbors has a brother that is a logger, and he apparently thought you might want two trucks to get it out: one to support the tree while the other cuts it from above.

Me not being a logger just nodded wisely.

RE: https://social.kernel.org/objects/98d5c1fa-1f94-452d-868c-f49b6f250579

I’m clearly a master of SEO.

When I google for “cold dark place filled with sadness and despair” right now (with the quotes), google gives me exactly one result - my Linux kernel github repository.

I will call my new hobby “Reverse Emo Googlewhacking”.

You’re welcome.

PSA: when I’m unanimously elected Grand Pooh-Bah and Emperor - it’s only a matter of time, since the current political model certainly isn’t working - the whole “Sunday is the first day of the week” nonsense in the US calendars will go away.

Just so you know.

Yeah, I can deal with it by just setting my locale to be UK instead of US, and since I’m ok with 24-hour time anyway, that works well for me.

I just want to save everybody else from this insanity. Who is with me?

So to prepare for that inevitable day, I would strongly suggest that any calendaring app writer already make “Monday is the first day of the week” an option. You know it’s what most people think anyway.

Kudos to Google Calendar for getting this right when so few others do (eg the “snooze until” calendar in gmail does not 😒).

@tommythorn strangely, I don’t actually mind imperial measurements. I’m perfectly fine converting C to F and back without any issues, and same for miles and km. I still have no idea how many feet to a mile, but it has never actually come up as an issue.

During travels, I’ve had rental cars that have speedometers in mph, while the posted speed limit is in km/h, and after a short initial confusion about why everybody is driving so slow, I adapt just fine.

I even got used to the strange date order.

But middle of the weekend is not the first day of the week. Not even after living here for more than a quarter century. It’s one of the very few things that still trip me. It happened today, in fact.

Thus the upcoming imperial decree.

Life is good. We have a dishwasher again.

Our old one broke (again!) and while I fixed it myself last time, I wasn’t willing to deal with a dishwasher that keeps breaking.

I grew up washing dishes by hand, and I’d largely forgotten how much I hated it. Ten days without a working dishwasher is ten days too many.

@powellnathanj lovely. They fixed it at some point since I originally subscribed. Except today I couldn’t actually even get to my account since I couldn’t prove to them I was human.

Maybe they’ve fixed whatever went wrong by now, maybe it was just the smoke in the newsroom, but it’s all moot by now. The phone worked fine.

@morgthorak I think you might want to make sure you don’t follow me.

Because your “woke communist propaganda” comment makes me think you’re a moron of the first order.

I strongly suspect I am one of those “woke communists” you worry about. But you probably couldn’t actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?

I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.

And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.

@juancnuno it’s not hard to cancel. It’s just really annoying. I at one time tried to use a pre-paid credit card just because I despised that practice so much, but that didn’t work.

If you rely on that kind of behavior to keep your customers, what does that really say about you?

The fact that they have some technical problems right now, and you can’t actually read the articles without going into soem endless captcha hell - who does that idiocy any more anyway - was just the last drop for me.

I didn’t mind subscribing per se.

@brianstorms Shh! Keep this private between just the two of us, but I actually have and use an ad-blocker. But I see those ads on my tablet, and I find them unreasonably annoying.

Don’t charge me, and then also show page-wide stupid and annoying ads. The news I can get elsewhere with less annoyance, and I’ll probably miss wordle and the new math game in beta the most.

Bye bye, nytimes.

When the only thing that continues to work on you ad-filled web site is the captcha, I’m not interested in supporting your journalism any more.

Ironically, another pet peeve of mine was the “you can sign up online, but you have to call and talk to a human to cancel”.

But with apparently nothing but your main page (and your ads - surprise surprise) working, that was actually good for once.

@kainoa real