Grsecurity stops issuing public patches, citing trademark abuse

by
Anonymous Coward
in linux on (#KT69)
story imageThe gurus behind the popular and respected Linux kernel hardening effort Grsecurity will stop providing their stable patches to the public. In future, only paying sponsors will get access to stable patches to shore up their kernels' defenses. The test series, unfit for production use, will however continue to be available, to avoid impacting the Gentoo Hardened and Arch Linux communities. The project's full source code will still be released to the public at large, but non-sponsors will have to pick through every update to find out what's applicable to them.

The whole situation stems from WindRiver, a subsidiary of Intel, which "has been using the grsecurity name all over its marketing material and blog posts to describe their backported, unsupported, unmaintained version in a version of Linux with other code modifications that haven't been evaluated by us for security impact." After spending several thousand on legal fees, faced with "a huge legal team, the capability to drag out the case for years" and a threat to request "all available sanctions and attorneys' fees" were the lawsuit to proceed against them, Grsecurity decided pursuing the case through the courts was not practical.

Re: Wrong (Score: -1, Troll)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-09-11 02:19 (#M3BM)

I'm saying they are wrong.

It is not in their interest, at all, to weaken their case.

If the FSF was to point out flaws or errors, such utterances could be used against them in court in a case
involving the copyrighted works that have been deeded to them. Such utterances, when it comes to cases involving works they own, can be very damaging. So they keep their mouth shut, rectify the situation
as best they can by issuing new versions of licenses.

Why do you think the GPL has gone through 3 revisions so far?

I really don't understand how you think you can argue with me from a position of ignorance though.
All you're doing is arguing "FSF is the authority, they must be right".
Not when they drafted v2. That was before stallman got the 1mill grant even, IIRC.
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