Why is always busybox? [LWN.net]

Why is always busybox?

Posted Dec 15, 2009 5:08 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Why is always busybox? by rgmoore
Parent article: Best Buy, Samsung, And Westinghouse Named In SFLC Suit Today

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.

(Log in to post comments)

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.