Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 11:42 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

As far as I know, it's an issue of whether the binary driver is a derivative work of the kernel, or not. If it's a body of code that was mostly written on another platform, and only the interfaces were ported to the Linux kernel, then no, it probably isn't derivative. (See the nVidia driver, for instance.) On the other hand, if the module in question uses a lot of internal kernel interfaces, hooks into various other subsystems, etc, then it probably IS derivative. This is a very tricky issue, though.

Posted Sep 2, 2004 12:10 UTC (Thu) by Fats (subscriber, #14882) [Link]

However, I remain confused about the position Linus is taking with respect to these modules. He has the power to declare that they are not allowed because they violate the GPL.

Unfortunately it is not. The only authority to decide if something is against a license like the GPL is a judge. Linus can only tell how he sees that the kernel license has to be interpreted. Then he has to be careful that his comment is not treated as legal advice because from what I heard this can have consequences in the USA.

Also he can't put more restrictions on the license then it is now without the approval of all kernel contributors which is I think an undoable task; certainly not worth the effort.