Home | Notifications | New Note | Local | Federated | Search | Logout
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
I am Director of System Architecture at SCI Semiconductor and a Visiting Researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. I remain actively involved in the #CHERI project, where I led the early language / compiler strand of the research, and am the maintainer of the #CHERIoT Platform.
I was on the FreeBSD Core Team for two terms, have been an LLVM developer since 2008, am the author of the GNUstep Objective-C runtime (libobjc2 and associated clang support), and am responsible for libcxxrt and the BSD-licensed device tree compiler.
Opinions expressed by me are not necessarily opinions. In all probability they are random ramblings and should be ignored. Failure to ignore may result in severe boredom and / or confusion. Shake well before opening. Keep refrigerated.
Warning: May contain greater than the recommended daily allowance of sarcasm.
No license, implied or explicit, is granted to use any of my posts for training AI models.
Joined: 2026-09-15 00:59:24
1 notes, 0 following, 0 followers
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange (2026-09-15 00:57:32)
For people who still believe the GPL influences corporations in a meaningful way:
When I was at Microsoft, I worked on a product that used Linux. The product was cancelled for largely unrelated reasons before it shipped, so the exact details are irrelevant but anything that links Linux needs to loop in lawyers, so I spent a lot of time talking to them.
Maybe 10% of the total time was spent with the technicalities of the GPL. The fact that the GPL is ambiguous and poorly written and the Linux syscall exemption is even worse made me expect long discussions about the legalese. But instead the conclusion of the GPL-focused discussions was basically:
No one really knows what the GPL can actually enforce and half of the stuff that's done with Linux is technically in violation. Microsoft ships Linux images for Azure that come with a click-through license that prohibits running them on any other cloud and no one cares. We can make a convincing argument that this is okay. Only a handful of companies can afford a protracted legal battle with Microsoft and none of them are sufficiently motivated to take us to court over this, so it's unlikely to come up.
The remaining 90% of the discussions were around how the product would be perceived by Linux maintainers, the wider Linux community, and the broader F/OSS ecosystem. Microsoft had put a lot of effort into the 'Microsoft <3 Linux' marketing things. The Ballmer-era alienation of the most active developer communities had cost the company a lot of ecosystem market share. The risk of pushing developers away from Microsoft products and platforms was something that the lawyers regarded as a huge risk. If two of the senior Linux maintainers had said 'we think this is not an acceptable use of Linux' then that would have torpedoed the project instantly.
The moral of this story is that, if positive engagement with your community is perceived as valuable, you have an enormous amount of leverage over big companies. At the