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

GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge)

Posted May 16, 2006 2:24 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge) by Arker
Parent article: GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge)

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.

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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.