Novell's IRC session on the Microsoft deal [LWN.net]

Novell's IRC session on the Microsoft deal

Posted Nov 28, 2006 11:47 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Novell's IRC session on the Microsoft deal by nix
Parent article: Novell's IRC session on the Microsoft deal

Sorry, I don't think that merely *reading /sys* binds you by the requirements of the GPL (if it does, then reading /proc does too, and I can think of a good few proprietary apps that do that, and nobody complains.)

/proc and /sys are quite different: /proc is decoupled from kernel internals, /sys is 1-to-1 mapping for kernel structures. Yuo can as well claim that your program is not bound by GPL if it uses just /dev/kmem to change the kernel and install 10Mb of code there: you are just using open()/read()/close(), right ?

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Novell's IRC session on the Microsoft deal

Posted Nov 28, 2006 23:58 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

This is where the law leaves me behind, I'm afraid. If using syscalls
alone is considered not to impose tight enough coupling to contaminate
with the GPL, I can't see how using syscalls alone to read a particular
filesystem can be considered tight enough either.

(But then this is all completely academic for me anyway as everything I've
ever controlled the license for I've GPLed, except for a couple of LGPL
libraries written for a past employer. ;) )