+3 cookies for the amazingly important & useful information, thank you.
This is very unfortunate. I would be interested in a list of all the companies that have been the cause for this drastic, but entirely necessary, action. Those companies, and their actions, should be brought out into the spotlight for all to see. What's more, I wouldn't be sad if their efforts were proven to be inadequate through a number of attacks that proved why grsec's standards are important.
I remember the call for copyright lawyers going out some time ago and checked with the lawyers that I knew at the time. Unfortunately, they specialized in musical copyrights and despite my attempts to explain that software copyrights also fall under the realm 'artistic rights to license', they were unwilling to handle such a case. Perhaps they knew what kind of assholes they'd be dealing with.
Although some of us will remain unaffected, for the most part, due to the fact that we port our own patches from testing or write our own patches from scratch, I expect this may have some far-reaching impacts that aren't easily predicted at this time. I would not doubt that another project that claims to do similar work would pop up in the next couple of years. I could see such a thing being started specifically to gain the interest of a number of people in the FOSS community and get new patches submitted by new people, effectively abusing a different subgroup for free work. However, I also expect to see quite a few new 0days circulate in the next year or so. Perhaps the latter will prompt the former; we shall see.
Update: it looks like VeriFone, producers a very popular credit/debit card processing system, are involved.
