Avoiding copyright violation with closed source modules

Avoiding copyright violation with closed source modules

Posted Jan 5, 2007 9:48 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646)
In reply to: Avoiding copyright violation with closed source modules by giraffedata
Parent article: Looking forward to 2007

It has been reported several times, the "smart closed source device drivers" like Nvidia's use isolation modules (shims) because their proprietary binary part is not Linux-specific but is designed to work on other x86 operating systems (most important, Windows) as well. The open source part maps the Linux API to the proprietary Nvidia API. (See, e.g, http://lwn.net/Articles/206435/)

If that's true, the legality of Nvidia's kernel module is not a settled thing, as it can be argued with good reasons that it's not derived code. Therefore, I would not hold my breath that someone sues Nvidia, it would be hard to make that a good case law.

Joachim

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