Re: incorrect taint of ndiswrapper

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On Oct 25, 2006, at 16:30:26, Alan Cox wrote:
Ar Mer, 2006-10-25 am 16:11 -0400, ysgrifennodd Pavel Roskin:
I don't see any legal reasons behind this restriction. A driver under GPL should be able to use any exported symbols. EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL is a technical mechanism of enforcing GPL against non-free code, but ndiswrapper is free. The non-free NDIS drivers are not using those symbols.

The combination of GPL wrapper and the NDIS driver as a work is not free (in fact its questionable if its even legal to ship such a combination together).

Assume the existence of two programs, Foo and Bar (ndiswrapper and vendor-NDIS-driver). If Foo and Bar are different licenses (GPL vs proprietary) it is not legal to distribute them as part of a single work unless you convince the copyright owners to relicense. It _is_ however, perfectly legal for an end user to download Foo from www.foo.com and Bar from www.bar.com and combine the two on his computer, whether or not that does anything useful. Since the ndiswrapper driver was not based on any particular driver but on a defined standard, using ndiswrapper with a proprietary NDIS driver is just as legal as using a proprietary database server on a GPLed Linux system. The technical issues of which ring the code runs in is irrelevant as long as the user obtained both pieces separately and neither is a derivative work of the other.

Besides, if the user does not distribute it then copyright law is irrelevant.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett
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