Obfuscated "GPL" driver?

Posted Oct 22, 2015 17:32 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
In reply to: Obfuscated "GPL" driver? by smckay
Parent article: Status updates for three graphics drivers

> No one in their right mind is going to argue in good faith that the Vivante driver is in the preferred form for modification.

I agree. That doesn't prevent the Vivante driver code from being released under a GPL license, so long as the work isn't considered derivative; copyright holders are not bound by the terms of the licenses they grant to others. Which leads to the question that I've been asking: could someone take the GPL-licensed (but obfuscated) Vivante driver, build a binary which is a derivative work of both the Vivante driver and the Linux kernel, and distribute that binary without violating the GPL license of the kernel?