GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge)

Posted May 15, 2006 22:21 UTC (Mon) by proski (subscriber, #104)
In reply to: GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge) by einstein
Parent article: GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge)

Well - duh... without the nvidia or ati drivers, none of it works, so that's kind of the point.

I heard there are free 3D drivers for some ATI cards. drivers/char/drm/Kconfig in the kernel lists some other cards: Intel, Matrox, Via and S3.

Honestly, the war on proprietary vendors is going to have to stop very soon, or linux will become irrelevant.

Are you a journalist? There is no war.

The e-mail asserts that the Kororaa CD is a single "work", rather than an aggregation. I think this is very debatable, but I understand the reasons for putting the distribution on hold.

Sure, the GPL-only extremists would be dancing a victory dance and giving each other high fives since after having stopped the "evil" Nvidia, but it would be a pyrrhic victory, as there will be almost no chance for affordable, high performance linux graphics.

You seem to see extremists everywhere. Programmers don't write like that (check any *-devel mailing list). Maybe you should write political speeches?

As for the "no chance" thing, the last time "the sky was falling" for Linux when WinModems came to the market. They are hardly relevant today.

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GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge)

Posted May 16, 2006 0:07 UTC (Tue) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link]

I don't think the cd is a single work, or that anyone made that assertion exactly.

The single work is the kernel. Since Kororaa actually compile the kernel+glue code+object blob to make a bootable kernel, on the cd, that will run the nvidia card, they are distributing a kernel they can't supply the source to.

While it's within your rights to make such a composite and use it yourself, the GPL doesn't give you permission to distribute under those conditions.

GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge)

Posted May 16, 2006 2:24 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

They actually link the nVidia driver into the kernel, rather than using a module? I didn't know this was even possible. I thought the glue code was written as an external module, rather than a kernel patch, and therefore you couldn't use kbuild to take both and produce a single output.

Now, it's potentially a problem to distribute the compiled glue code (which presumably uses kernel inlines) linked to the binary blob, but that's somewhat less of an issue (since the code included in the derived work is much much less, and has far fewer authors, and the copied code is sufficiently small to inline everywhere, and therefore less likely to be considered substantial enough to be copywritable).

In any case, it seems like Kororaa should use the standard ritual for handling this, where you distribute everything as separate files, and link the glue code to the binary blob at boot time, and then load the resulting module. That's good enough for Debian non-free, so it should be fine.

GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge)

Posted May 16, 2006 3:22 UTC (Tue) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link]

Linking is linking.

Ultimately it'll take a court case to settle, there really isn't any case law on this particular point, but from what I've seen there's a pretty strong concensus among the lawyers that it doesn't matter a bit whether you load it as a dynamically linked module or statically compile it into the kernel - you're still creating a derivative work.

As I tried to make clear, this isn't a problem for most distributions, because they don't do either - they simply 'aggregate' the materials on the same disk, but actually choosing to link and run the blob is still a step the customer has to take on his own. That's the loophole that lets nvidia and ati get away with playing games here.

But on a live cd, that's not really practical.

GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge)

Posted May 16, 2006 2:43 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

All quotes from the "cease and desist" e-mail on kororaa.org are about the CD, e.g.

The GPL license clause 2 does not allow combination of GPL and non-GPL work in a bigger work (your live CD) when the 2 pieces are not reasonably independent.

I don't think making the drivers modular will make any difference, since all the arguments would still apply.

The only reference to modules is in the nVidia reply. They apparently want to show that they provide a way to distribute their software, so they ignore or pretent to ignore the issue of the CD image being a derived work of both the kernel and the drivers.