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NDISwrapper dodges another bulletNDISwrapper dodges another bulletPosted Mar 5, 2008 19:12 UTC (Wed) by and (subscriber, #2883)In reply to: NDISwrapper dodges another bullet by JoeBuck Parent article: NDISwrapper dodges another bullet
> If the official kernel were to accept a patch that would prevent > ndiswrapper from accessing some symbols, nothing would stop a > distributor from reverting the patch, as GPLv2 gives distributors the > freedom to make modifications. This is true from a technical point of view, but there are probably other tricks available to get non-GPL modules to load. The whole point of the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL thing is more legal than technical. It goes along the lines of "If you use this symbol in non-GPLed code we may sue you". It also won't help if a distributor would remove the block since if they where really sued over a GPL violation, they couldn't distribute the kernel anymore making it hard to stay a linux distributor... The thing I was wondering about is that Linus reserves himself the right to remove such patches, even though he doesn't own the copyright for the piece of code in question in about 99% of all cases. I suppose if a copyright owner was to send Linus such a patch for one of the owner's interfaces, Linus would probably be required to accept it from a legal point of view. (Strictly technically this is not true, of cource, see the first paragraph...)
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NDISwrapper dodges another bullet Posted Mar 5, 2008 21:55 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] > The thing I was wondering about is that Linus reserves himself the right to remove such patches, He doesn't. If you go and look at the email exchange with him you'll notice that he threatened to banish anybody arguingon any sort of the legal mumbo-jumbo to his ignore file. He was only interested in the interfaces that ndiswrapper used and told people to contact those authors and try to work out a exception if they care about it working.
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