Grsecurity blaims insane conspiracy theory for self-imposed legal woes

From: agentoranger
Date: Tue Feb 18 2020 - 05:57:42 EST


Grsecurity blaims insane conspiracy theory for self-imposed legal woes
From the Grsecurity website: https://grsecurity.net/setting_the_record_straight_on_oss_v_perens_part1

Company Background

Open Source Security, Inc. was formed in 2008 initially to handle donations related to the grsecurity project, an open source project started in 2001 and freely (in all senses) available to the world until at least 2015. In 2015 we made our stable patches available to paid customers only via our website, a right granted by the GPL. At the time, we still had a freely (in all senses) test patch available. In April of 2017 we stopped providing the test patches to the general public.
A Troll's Revenge

Only a few months after this, a notorious Internet troll who had used grsecurity in the past and been banned from our forums for misogynistic comments was apparently upset at having his access cut off completely (after previously being denied access to the stable patches in 2015), and came out of hibernation to extend a private and public campaign to get revenge. This campaign continues today even, with posts to LKML, various distribution mailing lists, and posts and comments on Slashdot, Reddit, and other news aggregators. This person poses under various names, usernames, and email addresses, but most recently poses as a legitimate lawyer claiming the GPL can be rescinded. The emails come from @redchan.it,@airmail.cc, and other anonymous mailing services with usernames like "aconcernedfossdev", "visionsofalice", "gameonlinux", "nisus", and "unconditionedwitness". Most commonly, the email subject regarding us includes: "Why will no-one sue GrSecurity for their blatant GPL violation?" or "Yes you have standing to sue GRSecurity." In many instances, due to the changing names and email addresses, readers are unaware this is the same "MikeeUSA" troll, a self-professed misogynist and pedophile, that had been harrassing and issuing death threats to women in Open Source for years.

But the anonymous troll wasn't able to inflict the kind of damage he wanted to achieve alone. People saw an unstable individual mixing misogynistic comments with nonsensical legal theories, making it clear he was not an expert and his comments had no basis in reality. To inflict the damage he wanted, he'd need to enlist the help of someone the public trusts and views as an expert on license compliance matters, so that it'd be accepted as fact by the public. So in private, he contacted various influential people (including Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, Bradley Kuhn, and Bruce Perens) involved in Free Software/Open Source in an attempt to bait them into accepting and repeating his claims and wild legal theories as true. None of them took the bait, except for Bruce Perens.

Perens' Collaboration

(... and on it goes)
( https://grsecurity.net/setting_the_record_straight_on_oss_v_perens_part1 https://archive.is/7B9No
)
( https://grsecurity.net/setting_the_record_straight_on_oss_v_perens_part2 https://archive.is/7B9No
)
( https://grsecurity.net/setting_the_record_straight_on_oss_v_perens_part3 https://archive.is/tvlWf)