RMS is "fine" with GRSecurity GPL violation, says "may be legal"

From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> To: Sent: Tuesday, September 5, 2023 at 08:59:56 PM EDT Subject: Re: Could you please sue GRSecurity. [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > RMS: please. You sued Cisco. > Yet this is allowed? (they violate the copyright on your GCC, in addition to the Linux Kernel) It is not clear that they are violating the copyright on GCC. It looks like what they are doing may be lawful. We have nothing legally to do with Linux, the kernel. -- Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org) Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (my response: ) They are distributing non-separable derivative works to GCC under a no-redistribution agreement. Which is an additional restriction forbidden by the license you granted to them of your Copyrighted work (infact of your own Authorship aswell). >may be lawful See the word you used: may Anything may be lawful before a case of first impression is brought. Please bring one. Those patches and plugins they distribute cannot be used with anything other than GCC They are infact non-seperable derivative works. You have standing and reason to sue. Please do so. PLEASE.

>>72547 Uh, more context please, OP?

>>72547 What is GRSecurity and how is it violating the GPL?

>>72568 grsecurity is a patchset for Linux kernel that adds additional security features and exploit mitigation features. It used to be publicly available and free software but it was made private and they started to sell it (side note: you are allowed to sell free/libre software). But I don't know if they provide the source code to their customers (they say they do provide the src: https://grsecurity.net/agree/agreement_faq). But I'm not sure if they also add some additional restrictions to GPL'd code (Linux kernel and GCC) but if they do, then they violate GPL (for example, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#RequireCitation and https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLModuleLicense ) Sorry, I wasn't able to find the exact page I was looking for but these 2 items from GPL FAQ are good enough for now. For more info about grsecurity patchset: >https://grsecurity.net/features >https://wiki.debian.org/grsecurity >https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Hardened/Grsecurity2_Quickstart >https://www.gentoo.org/support/news-items/2017-08-19-hardened-sources-removal.html ( PaX is closely related thing )

>>72571 this is pretty much the same problem with RedHat

I guess it's time to switch to BSD then? Maybe OpenSolaris/Indiana?

>>72547 >Those patches and plugins they distribute cannot be used with anything other than GCC That doesn't mean they're violating the gcc's gpl. If I write code that uses some gcc specific compiler arguments, my code can be whatever license I want. If I modify gcc, then I need to comply with the gpl and make my modifications to gcc publicly available. >>72571 >side note: you are allowed to sell free/libre software Yes. The license was designed to allow that. Is it lame to sell free software especially software forked from other developers that intended it to be both free as in free beer and free as in freedom? Yes, absolutely. But the license was written to allow it. >>72575 >BSD BSD licenses are even more permissive in regards to commercialization than the GPL.

>>72575 Maybe when Hyperbola finishes forking BSD into something with a non-trash license.

meh who cares about licenses? fsf and stallman are a cult anyway. you can't resist the corporate power with licenses. their too strong.

>>72600 If you don't claim your rights de jure you are basically saying you don't care whether you have rights de facto.

>>72603 rights only exist on paper. the man can take away your paper rights whenever he wants. no license is gonna stop them. if they want to take it badly enough they can and they will. stallman types believe a piece of paper is gonna stop the governments and the corporations.

well in practice I have a computer that is full of free software I was able to download and compile myself, and some of it tweak. Bill Gates wouldn't have given this to me, Steve Jobs wouldn't have given this to me. RMS, GNU, and GPL might have something to do with it. Maybe they don't have the mystical power I'd like them to have but they seem to have achieved a few nice results in practice.

>>72605 but your hardware is not free anyway. if you wanted to have a system free of proprietary software you have to make sacrifices. it is true that rms, gnu project etc have brought us many great things. but they are delusional if they think licenses are going to protect us all from big tech and uncle sam. bill gates is motivated by money and sex but rms is motivated by narcissism and glory. in exchange for all these good things he wants you to worship him. this is why he dresses in his devilish act of wearing a computer disk on his head and pretending to be christ. this is why he insists on asinine naming conventions he invented by himself. the biggest problem with these people is they think they can create their own little corner of the world that wont be corrupted by capitalism and crusader imperialism but this is not so. if society is unfree how can software be free? this doesnt mean abandon everything but to free software we have to free society otherwise we will live like an ignorant prisoner trying to make his cell comfy and thinking he is free. free software cannot exist without a free society and a free society needs free software. but licenses alone will not give us truly free software and protect us from the satanic forces. if a corpo is sued for violating gpl they have the best lawyers in the world and the sympathy of the ameriKKKan courts. they will crush you simple. it makes no difference if it is bsd license or gpl. they dont matter in the bigger scheme of things. there needs to be a bigger movement of resistance to these corporate forces beyond making new software and fighting over licenses.

>>72604 >rights only exist on paper Rights exist inasmuch anyone is willing to defend them. >the man can take away your paper rights whenever he wants They can't erase the paper, nor the idea. The Man has to convince people that He is acting lawfully, within some kind of amorphous social contract. It is harder for The Man to do that when you have some kind of nominal rights, and more importantly, when you tell everyone the rights that you (and they) have. This is why they have to call Julian Assange a rapist, they have to make it seem like he doesn't deserve rights. Of course he could just be black-bagged and disappeared, we all could, but that flagrantly violates the social contract, especially for high-profile people like Assange, and ultimately weakens The Man.

>>72610 not wanting to misrepresent you but this comes across as a sort of defeatist lament: "its all or nothing and it sure ain't all". If you do feel this way then why aren't you either A) going out and killing your enemies, or B) quietly killing yourself in defeat ? I don't understand. You may be interested to look into cases where GPL or other free licenses have been used in courts, they're not without successes, though I have to imagine there are many cases which do not receive any notice, perhaps even from the offender. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license_litigation as for RMS personally, if you ask me he seems like just a particular sort of person who combines a general irreverance and poor intuition for social expectations (perhaps his environment at MIT and later his status has also not furnished him with the usual expectations of decorum) with a tendancy to consider problems from unconventional angles and under his personal and peculiar morals, which manages to alienate him from most political/ideological groupings. Calling him a glory seeking narcissist strikes me as unfair, perhaps he's too narcissistic to care about the glory conferred to him by others, and is rather just trying to fix things the way he sees that they ought to be. At any rate I think he's made the world a better place and therefore consider that he deserves my respect and appreciation. If you do the same then I'll give you the same, perhaps as suggested in my first paragraph.

>>72575 >>72599 I don't understand how this is a solution or that relevant.

>>72614 no i am not a defeatist. i believe in human potential and the potential of free software. but if society is enslaved we should fight to free it from tyrants and corrupt bourgeois. free software can help save society but software cannot be 100% free until society is also freed from the satanic grip. people cannot separate themselves from the corporate forces by creating new licenses and living in a separate reality. this is what rms and the fsf are doing. they want to live in their own little computer world that is free and think they can have their freedom there. but the corrupt forces of the world will not let you have your own private freedom so you have to fight against the man. so i am not saying society is enslaved and only after we get freedom that free software is possible. society is enslaved and free software can help liberate it but software can only be semi-free according to current conditions and truly 100% free software will only come when the rest of society is also freed. free software is the tool for fighting and it is also one of the things we should fight for. rms fsf and linus have done great work and have put powerful tools in the hands of ordinary people. the foss world they helped to create is an amazing achievement. but their worldview is narrow. free software is one element for world revolution. >>72611 the people are fooled easily. the us government did have a plan to kidnap and assassinate assange which was exposed as you know. rights are like the constitution. they are simply a piece of paper. in fact they are both concessions from the mighty and the powerful. this is even worse because rights are divine rights not a gift from a powerful or wealthy man who can cancel them at any time. if the us government tries to take away your rights like they have been doing for 20 years a great number of the common people are ready to accept this. the ameriKKKan supreme court could say tomorrow that nobody is bound to respect free and open source licenses and the public would just accept this. the whole world of free software can collapse overnight because people like rms or linus torvalds and their followers think that a corrupt court system of a tyrannical oppressor regime will guarantee it.

I don't care, why would I care?

GNU/Linux is a total failure. The whole point was to create a free OS that would unify the world, win the UNIX wars and get rid of all these proprietary unixes being pushed by AT&T or IBM. But it only fragmented things even more. Nothing is compatible with anything else. Before people would write programs that would work on UNIX systems. Now they come out for stuff for separate Linux distros which is a nightmare. You have to make different versions or upgrades of the same fuarrrking software for different distros. That's the main reason Linux is a failure. Now there is the desktop environments which are either bloated like KDE or vomit GNOME. Why do they all have different package managers? Why didn't the GNU project just use the fuarrrking BSD kernel? Why didn't they prioritize kernel development and design the whole system in house? Then we wouldn't have this GNU/Linux mess and they'd have a whole operating system instead of a bunch of components duct taped together in different distros. Windows is a horse designed by committee. Linux is frankenstein monster where each part was designed by a separate committee and another one glues them together and releases it. Who thought this would actually work? Say what you like about GPL violations. Linux has already failed. It isn't even free software anymore there's DRM in the kernel. It's even used by the fuarrrking NSA, the same NSA that called put people who read Linux Journal on an extremism watch list. GPL violations don't mean soykaf anymore. We need a new license (one that bans intelligence agencies from making their own versions), a new free OS, one that won't repeat the mistakes of GNU project and Linux, and is actually usable and within reach for ordinary people too.

>>72640 >the whole world of free software can collapse overnight because people like rms or linus torvalds and their followers think that a corrupt court system of a tyrannical oppressor regime will guarantee it. I don't think free software would fall apart. People mainly give back because they feel they should, not because they are legally forced to. The people who don't feel like they should already don't.

>>72685 >GPL violations don't mean soykaf anymore did they ever ? that said, they do sometimes go to court and its not like they don't win somewhat >We need a new license oh right because if gpl violations dont mean soykaf anymore a new better license will. >Now they come out for stuff for separate Linux distros which is a nightmare I dont know how much you've done with packaging packages but its often not that bad. Its not like the upstream developer for random minor package No. 10739228 needs to think about the difference between fedora and debian for the most part, he just requires libs and they get pulled in by the packager as the distro requires. Its honestly not especially design by commitee and more design by hoard. People do what they want and it kinda works. there are commitees, sure. Probably too many. IDK if what you're suggesting doesnt sound like more of them though lol. Anyway why don't you start this better OS. I bet we can find someone here to do the logo.

when has the FSF/GNU project actually done anything for protecting GNU licensed projects as of late? So far I only see that kind of action being taken by the SFC who actually stopped associating with the FSF after they chose to bring Stallman back. And even then, it's only in very rare cases like against John Deere. GNU as a license does not functionally protect people because no one who gives a soykaf about the license (or pretends to) has the money or inclination to fight the violators of the license, who tend to be big tech corporations. FSF just cares more about being able to define what "freedom" is and being in control of "freedom."

>>72685 they went wrong when they decided to copy unix, creating thousands of rabbit hole autist traps (like PAM) irrelevant to a normal desktop user. you cant use unix for a personal computer or laptop, not what its made for. you can do it with lots of effort and wasted time and the result is garbage you have today

>>72722 gnu is about as old as the first commercially available 'mobile computers'. As I understand it the initial motivation was more about fixing xerox printers than 'year of the gnu plus leenux desktop'.

I never understood all that "unix is not suited for desktop computers" complaint. What makes it so bad? What makes it suposedly worse than alternatives?

>>72727 Well, I think most people just mean video game support, but everyone else usually means software support, in general. Although, I want to point out that they are also just repeating the same things that people were saying in the early 2000's and most of this isn't the case anymore.

>>72692 >oh right because if gpl violations dont mean soykaf anymore a new better license will. Because GPL wasn't written by someone with a law degree and their status is pretty shady. Paying a legal team to write a new license that covers all the basis would be good. Linux isn't widely supported because companies hate developing software for it outside of stuff only tech people use. Which sane company is going to spend time and money to develop updates for Debian, Fedora, Arch etc? Especially on something that only a tiny faction of normal people will ever use? BSD and OpenIndiana exist. We have complete free and open source Unix operating systems. This makes GNU project almost redundant. We just don't have anything for ordinary people, although Mac OS is FreeBSD based anyway. >>72722 Unix is fine for ordinary people. Problem is Unix was really for industrial equipment and computer scientists, GNU was a clone of that by computer nerds who wanted their own OS, and nobody ever developed something for the ordinary desktop user in mind. The whole GNU project was a disaster. They developed the kernel last. The guys working on the pure microkernel (a really bad choice) weren't well coordinated with everyone else working on the system so the whole thing failed. They could have just gone with BSD and saved everyone from this mess, but RMS wanted all the glory for himself. Linux suffers because of fuarrrked up design choices and heavy fragmentation. Ordinary people are afraid of the command line and freak out at the sight of a terminal, and to get Linux to run games you have to install extra software and do tweaking even seasoned gamers are too scared or lazy to do. If it wasn't for that, Linux would have spread like a wildfire. The problem for Unix is Windows monopoly. Practically every machine has Microshit preinstalled and at workplaces or in schools everybody is using Windows. Ordinary people are forced to use it. The only exception is Mac OS, which is a proprietary Unix and has eaten a chunk of Bill Gates market share. So clearly a desktop Unix for the average user is possible and already popular, part of the reason so many normal people love Mac is because it's Unix based. It's just nonfree proprietary enslavement. Linux or BSD don't come pre-installed. If someone wants that on their machine, they have to seek it out first, so that automatically cuts out 90% of ordinary computer users.

>>72732 >Which sane company is going to spend time and money to develop updates for Debian, Fedora, Arch etc? Quite a few of them, actually. Most of the time you just have to target Ubuntu and everything else just werks. The nerds that use other distros will happily fix your software for you, that's what valve relies on.

>>72732 >Because GPL wasn't written by someone with a law degree and their status is pretty shady. Paying a legal team to write a new license that covers all the basis would be good. There's a lot of opensource/free ish licesnses out there, are there any you consider 'good'? For what reason, what have they accomplished ? What are the actual problems with GPL that make it dubious but a 'serious' license written by 'serious' lawyers would resolve ? These are basically just agreements that any suficiently dilligent autist should be able to write as far as I'm aware, but enforcement and such things are a very different and more difficult matter. Then again, what can a lawyer do except weave the magic words in a more orthodox fashion, and pray the witchdoctery works? GPLv3 was written with assistance from several lawyers and managed to not be adopted by Linux.

>>72732 >bla bla typical nerd canon bla >unix is fine for normal people nope https://zzzchan.xyz/b/thread/164788.html >plug USB stick in >access denied because uid is all some number that doesnt even exist on your system (no normal person thinks this is a real concept so they wouldnt even go study to figure out what the problem is) >want to list contents of a folder >access denied because missing execute bit >want to secure folder from other users reading it >fuarrrks it up due to impossible to remember and largely pointless permission model that subtly changes between different unixes (for example bsd making new files take the parent folder gid instead of your processes gid) yeah no, no non autist let alone most autist larpers know or want to deal with this soykaf i shouldnt even haev users on my system if its a desktop and thats just one small example of how unix provides all kinds of features i will never need yet get in my way, as a far beyond casual user, let alone any casual user will ever care about

>>72740 >yeah no, no non autist let alone most autist larpers know or want to deal with this soykaf Good thing you almost never do. >i shouldnt even haev users on my system if its a desktop ...what if it's a multiple-user system?

Stop drinking the kool-aid. GNU+Linux is as strong as never before. grsec is like kicking dead whales down the beach, but they strengthen Linux dominance. Shit thread.

>>72744 what if it isnt like 99.9999999% of use cases now that a laptop costs $1 and this discussion is only about single users anyway. unix does not support a single user desktop. thinking otherwise just inconveniences yourself

ok sure cellphones laptops etc probably could be single user maybe that would be better for normal people yes I dont think this is hard to agree with. Unix was not designed for these pocket sized computers which did not exist at the time of its conception, and things like android therefore must deal with the peculiarities and choices of a system designed to run on an entierly different system. That said I dont have a smartphone and never use my laptop. I kinda like Linux, sure I can imagine maybe a better system but it is what it is and it basically works. If someone wants to come along and try to make a better system Ill cheer for them but at the moment Linux is the best and it ain't that bad.

>>72753 >99.9999999% of use cases bit of hyperbole eh? >unix does not support a single user desktop. Apparently it does, because I'm using it for that purpose. >>72754 >and things like android therefore must deal with the peculiarities and choices of a system designed to run on an entierly different system. Let's be clear: android isn't unix at all. Linux is just the kernel, it's designed for unix but android is an example of a linux system that is not unix.

>>72547 Yo mikee, good to see you are still going. Nice to know someone out there still gives a crap. You still working on CEA?