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Defence of the GPL realm (The H)Defence of the GPL realm (The H)Posted Dec 18, 2012 10:54 UTC (Tue) by airlied (subscriber, #9104)In reply to: Defence of the GPL realm (The H) by dlang Parent article: Defence of the GPL realm (The H)
Also since nvidia don't distribute the Linux kernel and their binary driver at the same time, or same place, it would be even trickier. They do this quite deliberately.
There has been cases of distros/live cd that did ship both being hit with CnD from kernel devs.
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Defence of the GPL realm (The H) Posted Dec 18, 2012 12:54 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
It's interesting to hear of cease-and-desist orders, certainly.
Again, farnz makes the crucial point upthread: it's all about the distribution. When you have someone distributing things to be used together as one system and where the nature of the GPL-licensed software signals the intent that anything taking advantage of that software must adhere to the conditions of the GPL, the "derived work" defence is merely something that can be used to limit the claims of the GPL if the relevant copyright law imposes restrictions on what licences can require of others.
So, if you take something which deliberately says that "you had better be able to release the source for all this" if you distribute your Linux system "with added Nvidia magic" and then combine it with the Nvidia drivers for which you don't have sources, then you really have to have a better argument than "they're not really touching (come on, your honour!)". After all, there are plenty of licence agreements that impose more peculiar and arbitrary restrictions on how works are used.
Defence of the GPL realm (The H) Posted Jan 7, 2013 0:05 UTC (Mon) by DHR (guest, #81356) [Link]
As far as I know, almost all Android devices are distributed with binary Linux kernels and binary device driver modules. These device drivers are often closed-source. In particular, I think all reasonable video drivers are closed source.
So: is this a license violation? I guess not since a majority of the smart phone world would then be uncompliant.
Defence of the GPL realm (The H) Posted Jan 7, 2013 5:21 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
So far, nobody who has standing to do so has considered these to be a license violation enough to take action, so for practical matters they are not.
It gets hard when a lot of the 'binary drivers' are userspace components like the camera drivers on most devices.
Defence of the GPL realm (The H) Posted Jan 7, 2013 5:24 UTC (Mon) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]
Is nouveau an unreasonable video driver? Or did you mean all reasonable smartphone GPU drivers?
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