There was a lot of history with Linus and Alan about how the AFS module would interface with the kernel.. And the whole question of "stable" interfaces back around the 2.0 days (like when Linus broke binary compatibility by rearranging the members of a structure). Back then AFS _couldn't_ go into the kernel; it wasn't open source, and the other Linux developers knew it. They just haven't relearned that times have changed.
It still can't go into the kernel. It's open source, but not distributed under the GPL, and the license is beyond our power to change.
As if GPL is the only open source license?? Feh!
Ah, but that's exactly what the Linux folks seem to think. The broken "tainting" model the Linux folks have adopted makes no provision for non-GPL open-source licenses. They assume that either your license is the GPL, or you suck.
The sad thing is, the original intent of the tainting stuff was to make it easy to tell people to go away when their machine was broken by some binary-only module, instead of spending lots of time tracking down a problem only to discover that it's buried inside something you don't have source for. Fine; I was willing to debug problems with AFS when it was binary-only, instead of sending people to linux-kernel. Really, I still am, especially when it's my users involved.
But that doesn't excuse the "your license is not exactly the same as our license, and your architecture is not based on whatever bizarre ideas's we've had in the last few years, so we hate your forever and ever and will do everything in our power to try to screw you".
I'm sorry, but I'm sick and tired of the holier-than-thou attitude of the Linux folks. I've run AFS on Sun 2's and IBM RT's and damn near everything else even vaguely UNIX-like made since then, and most of those "closed" OS vendors have been more helpful and provided more stable interfaces than Linux. SGI added hooks to login and xdm. HP went to some trouble to publish previously-unavailable headers needed by OpenAFS. NeXT made changes to their directory browser so it wouldn't choke on /afs. The Linux maintainers, on the other hand, tell us we can't have our syscall any more, demand that we completly rearchitect the user-kernel interface that has worked well for us on many platforms over a couple of decades, and then WON'T EVEN GIVE US THE TOOLS TO DO SO. That's just idiotic.
-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sr. Research Systems Programmer School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA
_______________________________________________ OpenAFS-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-devel
