Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/939842/

The kernel community has never had a smooth relationship with the purveyors
of proprietary kernel modules. Developers tend to strongly dislike those
modules, which cannot be debugged or fixed by anybody other than their
creator, and many see them as a violation of the kernel’s license and their
copyrights on the code. Nonetheless, proprietary modules are tolerated,
within bounds. A recent patch from Christoph Hellwig suggests that those
bounds are about to be tightened slightly, in a somewhat surprising way.