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Storm in a TeacupStorm in a TeacupPosted Mar 21, 2011 15:45 UTC (Mon) by jejb (subscriber, #6654)Parent article: Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?
Fortunately, most of the community (except Florian) manage to recognise a Microsoft troll when they see one:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/lawyer-behind-...
Since the end result of a BSD licensed bionic is explicitly permitted by the Linux Kernel COPYING file, as Bradly Kuhn and others have pointed out, there's no real story here. (Well, except for one competitor trying to FUD another).
There is a technical question about whether the methods Google chose to use on the header files are the correct ones ... and it's an important one for compliance people to think about. However, practically, if anyone tried to take this to court, a judge would ask what the damages and remedy were. The damages are essentially zero (because the end result is permitted) and the remedy would likely be to go back and get the method right with possibly a wrist slap if the company in question hadn't tried to do the right thing (which likely wouldn't apply in the Google case because they had).
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Storm in a Teacup Posted Mar 21, 2011 17:33 UTC (Mon) by cladisch (✭ supporter ✭, #50193) [Link] Fortunately, most of the community (except Florian) He is not part of the community, he is a lobbyist. manage to recognise a Microsoft troll when they see one As you can see by his posts, he is a Microsoft troll. His contract has quite severe clauses against the connection to his employer becoming known, so when asked about this, has to resort to quite an amusing amount of tapdancing, as seen here: http://lwn.net/Articles/434587/
Storm in a Teacup Posted Mar 22, 2011 7:02 UTC (Tue) by jwildeboer (guest, #55642) [Link]
BTW Linus has spoken - http://www.itworld.com/open-source/140916/android-sued-mi...
"It seems totally bogus. We've always made it very clear that the kernel system call interfaces do not in any way result in a derived work as per the GPL, and the kernel details are exported through the kernel headers to all the normal glibc interfaces too."
[...]
"Of course, we do have our own 'internal' headers too, and we have stuff that is meant to be relevant only for the kernel. But there would be no point for Google to even use those, since they are useless outside of the kernel, so I don't see what the whole brouhaha would be all about. Except if it's somebody politically motivated (or motivated by some need of attention)," he continued.
And if it's indeed attention that these parties want, Torvalds has a suggestion for that, as well.
"If it's some desperate cry for attention by somebody, I just wish those people would release their own sex tapes or something, rather than drag the Linux kernel into their sordid world," Torvalds concluded.
Storm in a Teacup Posted Mar 22, 2011 10:13 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] Good heavens. Does Linus really want a Naughton-Mueller sex tape? Oh well, I guess he's right: it would be preferable to their dragging Linux into their sordid worlds.
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