The Linux kernel is unambiguously licensed under GPL version 2.0.

Posted May 24, 2006 14:47 UTC (Wed) by kakareka (guest, #5204)
In reply to: The Linux kernel is unambiguously licensed under GPL version 2.0. by Wol
Parent article: Kororaa and the GPL - Update 1

Macros will only get included in a binary if actually used. Just including your header (ie, #include in the source) doesn't mean the binary contains your code and couldn't be considered derivative. Also, most macros are probably too simplistic to be copyrightable (eg, min and max macros).

John

The Linux kernel macros

Posted May 24, 2006 16:29 UTC (Wed) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link]

Heh - have you seen the min/max macros the kernel uses? Here's the debate (the first 1/2 a dozen entries or so):

<http://www.google.com/search?q=min+max+macro+site%3Alwn.n...>

And the current form (as of 2.6.16.18), which do type checking:

<http://lxr.linux.no/source/include/linux/kernel.h>

Also, I think a lot of the time, the kernel uses inline functions, and they are frequenly non-trivial. I think a lot of the scheduling and locking (spinlocks, sems, etc) functions are actually inline functions. Basically, a LOT of functionality is incorporated in in kernel headers.

So it get really hard to interact with the kernel without including kernel headers and using these inline functions - and from there, you get to a derived work pretty quickly.

Pete