GPL violation?

GPL violation?

Posted Oct 7, 2009 11:08 UTC (Wed) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063)
In reply to: GPL violation? by drag
Parent article: Netgear's open-source router

"A: Its not up to the GPL to decide things like that. It simply does not have the legal authority. It all depends whether or not the drivers are "derivative works" of the Linux kernel. This is a legal concept/term and is defined by law and court precedent.. its up to a judge to decide what exactly is and is not derivative."

Wrong. The licence can refuse you permission to distribute the GPL'd work itself, with whatever conditions it requires.

Think about this example:

I can write a licence, say for an ebook reader, which says "You may never ship this software with a bundled copy of the Kama Sutra". That licence is perfectly valid. It isn't claiming any copyright on the Kama Sutra. It doesn't require the Kama Sutra to be a derived work of my software. Copyright law says that you may only distribute my program if I permit you to do so, and I'm telling you that you're not allowed to do so if you're shipping it with the Kama Sutra. The copyright I hold on my work allows me to do that. I do have that legal authority.

That's basically what the GPL is doing. It's saying that you can distribute the GPL'd work only if you don't ship it as part of a larger whole which contains non-GPL'd stuff.

It says that if you want to make a collective work, then all parts of that work need to be GPL'd. It's very clear that this applies even when the other parts of that collective work are independent and separate works in themselves, and that the GPL needs to apply to each and every part, regardless of who wrote it.

And just like the Kama Sutra example above, it's not claiming copyright on those other parts, or that they are a derived work of the GPL'd work. It's just that unless you abide by the conditions of the GPL, you do not have permission to distribute the original GPL'd work.

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