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

GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge)

Posted May 16, 2006 3:22 UTC (Tue) by Arker (guest, #14205)
In reply to: GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge) by iabervon
Parent article: GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge)

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.

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