&gt; license is loaded the kernel will mark itself as &quot;tainted&quot;. (It could just as well refuse to load the module, but it doesn&#x27;t.)<p>Why, because they used the word &quot;tainted&quot;? I kind of thought that always meant to be used a flag for &quot;this user loaded some random binary in the kernel and now complains there is bug &quot;. So developers look at the debug output and see &quot;oh, well, it is tained, so, we won&#x27;t waste time on this, you are on your own&quot; kind of stuff. Which is reasonable.<p>As you said, if they didn&#x27;t want it to work with non-GPL modules, they could have prevented loading. Unless you think they setup a honeypot of sorts -- &quot;We&#x27;ll trick them, then sue them!&quot;.