Re: GPL V3 and Linux - Dead Copyright Holders

["Christopher Friesen" <cfriesen@nortel.com>]

Lee Revell wrote:

> What nvidia is doing is already illegal under the GPLv2.

I don't think that's been legally proven.

The question is whether it is a derivative work.  If their driver core 
(aka the binary blob) is common to all their drivers (across multiple 
OS's), it could be argued that the binary blob itself is not a 
derivative work.  One could almost view it as firmware.

If they ship the binary blob as well as code that interfaces the binary 
blob with the kernel, and the end-user compiles the code together and 
loads it into the kernel, does that necessarily violate the GPL?

Chris

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