Re: GPL vs non-GPL device drivers

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v j wrote:
This is in reference to the following thread:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/12/14/63

I am not sure if this is ever addressed in LKML, but linux is _very_
popular in the embedded space. We (an embedded vendor) chose Linux 3
years back because of its lack of royalty model, robustness and
availability of infinite number of open-source tools.
[...]
However we have a worrying trend here. If at some point it becomes
illegal to load our modules into the linux kernel, then it is
unacceptable to us. We would have been better off choosing VxWorks or
OSE 3 years ago when we made an OS choice. The fact that Linux is
becoming more and more closed is very very alarming.

Question to the world here: Distros make, as a matter of course, a series of modifications to the Linux Kernel so that their modules or features work. What stops VJ making a patchset which effectively s/EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL/EXPORT_SYMBOL/g 's the kernel source then distributing that under the GPL? He then supplies his un-GPL'd modules to the world which just happen to only run on the modified kernel. I've read the GPL of course (IANAL though) and I can't see what this violates except the /spirit/ of the license. Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly against anyone doing what I just mentioned, I believe it to be immoral taking someone's GPL'd code and mangling it in such a way. I speak as an embedded developer myself whose company decided that running our code under Linux and distributing our code under the GPL was far preferable to running closed-source software on a closed-source platform.

I'll finish off to VJ: If you want to be alarmed, go ahead and switch to VxWorks, the Linux community will live on. It might have a smaller user-base in embedded-land but that's the nature of the beast. A large user-base doesn't mean much to something like linux unless it comes with a large, open-source-minded developer-base.

--Ben.
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