GPL is a head-fake. "Is Grsecurity actually useful in 2025?" (GCC and *nix copyright discussion)
>>106675497Yes, you get hacked very quickly if you run a linux server without it.
MacOSX, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and windows today all have the hardening
features that PaX created in the 90s and early 2000-2001.
Linux does not. Because the GPL is just a longer BSD license, essentially.
If the GPL was anything other than a longer BSD license: you would
still have Grsecurity as opensource. Which you do not any longer.
Samen with the GCC plugins that do most of that hardening work:
they're not available to you because share-alike Free Software is
dead. Unenforcable apparently. RMS completely agrees that the GPL is
not an enforcable "deal". I asked him about the GCC plugins over email
and he said there was nothing they could do. Essentially agreeing that
the GPL is basically the BSD license but tries to fake you out into
giving up your changes. It cant or wont ever enforce those demands.
They simply cannot take your copyrighted changes and dictate what or
how you release them, to anyone.
They can't do this for two reasons:
1) US courts won't allow anything similar to "slavery contracts": that
is forced labour. They will only allow money damages: but will not
order source code handed over to you that someone else wrote, GPL or
not. Nor will they order strict adherence to the "agreement" (not that
any agreement occured. So no ordering the source code be "allowed" to
be distributed if the actual owner of the changes says no.
2) The more recent US Supreme court copyright case between Google and
Oracle: As part of the opinion, if you read it, the Court simply
re-stated the purpose of copyright. And it found that if a party takes
a Work, someone else's Work, and uses it in a business that the
Copyright owner wasn't explointing at all (in this case : Cell
phones): then using that code is fair-use. [Also note: in the Google
vs Oracle case, Google DID copy "real code", not just "object headers"
as is often claimed. If you don't believe me contact the software
engineers involved in the legal fight.]
GCC and Linux aren't in any field of business. So Grsecurity can do as
they wish: they can ignore the unenforcable sections of the GPL, and
they do.
The FSF and RMS agree on this. Ask them. They'll tell you nothing can
be done about it, or ignore you as if the issue doesn't exist.
Basically the GPL is a head-fake.
It pretends to
1) Be a contract (it isn't)
2) Substitute money payments for in-kind payments (code for code)
You then
3) Actually release your own hard-fought code to the "world"
4) Grsecurity rips you off, and doesn't let anyone redistribute their
changes (very successfully)
The Jacsoben case that is often cited found the Artistic license was a
copyright license: something we already knew. People who say it proved
the GPL was a "contract" are reading it as if it is upside-down. It
found that since the Artistic license was a copyright license the
dispute could be adjudicated in federal court under copyright law: and
not just in state court. The "contract" in question was the
pay-for-commercial-license OR use Artistic-licens-for-free option. The
artistic license alone itself is not a contract. Nor is the GPL.
>Is Grsecurity actually useful in 2025?
It shows that everything, legally, that RMS did was fake.
He should have just programmed more.
But then again, he did say it was a "hack" of the US-Legal system:
Guess what: that "hack" failed.
In any hack you have to have at least someone enter an initial
keystroke or button click to get things going, afterall.