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Why is always busybox?Why is always busybox?Posted Dec 14, 2009 23:53 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)In reply to: Why is always busybox? by arjan Parent article: Best Buy, Samsung, And Westinghouse Named In SFLC Suit Today Linus has clearly expressed his opinion that kernel modules are not necessarily derivatives of the kernel. Something that was originally written for Linux and depends explicitly on it would clearly be a derivative. But Linus's opinion is that a module that was originally written for a different OS and was ported to Linux with minimal changes would not count as a derivative of Linux. Since the GPL depends on copyright provisions that apply to derivative works, it wouldn't apply to a module that doesn't count as a derivative. As far as I can tell, Linus's analysis is correct, and a suit against a company that ported its driver for another OS and released it under a non-GPL license- NVidia being an obvious example- would fail in court.
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Why is always busybox? Posted Dec 15, 2009 5:08 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Who decides what a derivative is is not Linus, GPL, or anybody else except a judge interpreting law and precedent. It's absolutely possible that one module can be a derivative and another one is not. Most above people (and probably you also) understand that 'Derivative' is a very specific legal term that is included in the copyright law of the USA. Any copyright license, like the GPL, is limited by the scope of that legal definition. It does not matter what the copyright holder _wants_ something to be, his power in controlling the work of others is limited by "derivative", at least in copyright law.With Nvidia they are shoehorning a great big blob of Windows driver code into the Linux kernel. The portion of the code that is specifically made for Linux is GPL'd. So the argument goes that the non-GPL'd parts of the driver are actually written for a different OS or at least a multitude of OSes and since it was not developed for Linux and does not depend on Linux kernel code then it is not derivative. ... Presumably. Who knows how true that is. It may be possible to sue Nvidia, but it is certainly not a slam-dunk case and, anyways, it seems that nobody is interested in doing so.
Why is always busybox? Posted Dec 15, 2009 17:59 UTC (Tue) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
the other thing is that the GPL is explicity *not* a use license. So long as the end user is the one doing it, they cannot argue that binary-only drivers are not legal. The interface between the binary and the GPL-ed software is the crucial bit, as it must be distributed to the end-users.
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