On Mon, 23 Mar 2026, Christian Schulte wrote:

> I am kind of lost in this thread. Regarding the initial request to merge
> support for an ext4 filesystem into base, I searched for documentation
> about that ext4 filesystem in question. I found some GPL licensed wiki
> pages. The majority of available documentation either directly or
> indirectly points at GPL licensed code. In my understanding of the issue
> discussed in this thread this already introduces licensing issues. Even
> if you would write an ext4 filesystem driver from scratch for base, you
> would almost always need to incorporate knowledge carrying an illiberal
> license. I would rate that a show stopper, but I may be misunderstanding
> the issue at hand.

Knowledge isn't the problem - facts, ideas and algorithms aren't
copyrightable. It's the specific instantiation of these in a creative
work (i.e. code) that is subject to copyright.

A human implementing a specification isn't copyright infringement.
There's quite a bit of case law that establishes this.

Things get more murky when you open yourself to the argument that
you're copying code rather than implementing it yourself.

IANAL, etc.

-d