On Fri, 2005-11-04 at 03:46 +0400, Manu Abraham wrote:Since this issue is subject to discussion, i think a consensus can be reached, with a discussion with the relevant owners, _if_ it needs to be changed. I did not imply that it needs to be changed.
We have in the DVB subsystem most of the exported symbols as EXPORT_SYMBOL itself, rather than EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL. I think if this needs to be changed, we would require a global change of all symbols to the same to maintain consistency. If you require that change we can have a change but i would think that the discussions be done with the relevant copyright holders too, eventhough probably most of the authors won't have any objection.
I don't know if I ever contributed code to the DVB subsystem which is
actually exported, but in case I did, then I am against changing the
affected EXPORT_SYMBOLs.
This would make it impossible to the use source code of most hardware
vendors for embedded products because they usually have different
licenses for their "run-on-every-embedded-platform-and-even-on-windows"
drivers.
Also I remember people telling on lkml that EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL was used
for new kernel internal code only and I can't see how this applies to
dvb-pll or any other part of the dvb subsystem which grew up outside the
kernel tree.