The race to replace Redis

> It's generally believed the NVIDIA driver isn't a derivative work of Linux because it's almost all original NVIDIA work with just a Linux shim layer, but this may not be the case for all drivers.

This confuses two issues. As far as NVIDIA is concerned, Linux is a derivative work of NVIDIA because Linux has been modified to work with the NVIDIA driver ... and seeing as (was it NVIDIA?) did the modifications they wouldn't have a leg to stand on if they complained. (If it wasn't them wrote the modifications, they probably don't care and by now it's eminent estoppel.)

And as far as Linux is concerned, Linus has always been very clear that the existence of a published A(P/B)I delineates a clear boundary which copyright is deemed not to cross. So whether linking has occurred or not (in many / most cases I would argue it has), there exists a clear grant of licence to create derivative works.

As PJ said, "law is squishy". Imho linking always creates a derivative work, but firstly you need to ask which is the derivative work, secondly whether a licence exists, and thirdly whether any copyright exists to enforce!

As for "is a program a copyrightable work", my answer would be "if it's not trivial, yes it is". But again, what's "trivial"? The mathematical meaning feels completely wrong to most people - the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is "trivial" - it follows inevitably from the pre-conditions, but it's a heck of a lot of hard slog to do the maths.

A program is a lot like a novel - the basic plot - what the program does - is not copyrightable, but the way you do it *probably* contains a lot of creativity - not directly related to the actual solution - that you can copyright.

Cheers,
Wol