GPLv2 enforcement

Posted Mar 22, 2007 8:29 UTC (Thu) by MKesper (subscriber, #38539)
In reply to: GPLv2 enforcement by ekj
Parent article: The Torvalds Transcript (InformationWeek)

This does only apply to things like ndiswrapper, but clearly not to such things like ATI or nvidia (or whatever...) binary drivers. They _have to_ know about kernel details.

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GPLv2 enforcement

Posted Mar 22, 2007 14:02 UTC (Thu) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link] (1 responses)

Not really. The underlying hardware is the same, so they make certain assumption in their code. How to get to access to the hardware might depend on what kernel is run, but not much more. For that the Nvidia driver has a BSD wrapper.

The GPL doesn't disallow that wrapper, nor does it disallow loading binary only modules at runtime. That wrapper doesn't disallow being linked to the Nvidia binary either.

So if the driver is written independently from Linux (which seems to be the case, as it's a modified Windows driver), Nvidia really doesn't break the GPL.

It only becomes interesting when the driver is distributed together with the kernel, as then the question is whether it's mere aggregation, or a combined work. But even then it isn't Nvidia who's breaking the GPL, but the distributors.

GPLv2 enforcement

Posted Mar 29, 2007 20:15 UTC (Thu) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link]

The BSD wrapper is a derivative work of the kernel. NVidia doesn't have the copyright to the kernel, so it's no BSD wrapper at all, it's a GPL wrapper. Now it's sole purpose is to link itself to a non-GPL-compatible blob... I think a linux copyright holder could make a case out of that, if so inclined?