On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 03:57, Michael A. Peters wrote: > Having a discussion on the GPL - and the broadcom driver in Linksys > routers came up. > > I'm taking the position that since it is a kernel module, it modifies > the kernel when the kernel loads it - and thus, it is no different than > if they were shipping a static kernel with the module compiled in, and > thus they (Linksys) are in violation of the GPL because they are > shipping a modified GPL product (the kernel) without releasing the > source to their modifications. Regardless of what the GPL does or doesn't say, it only has effect based on copyright law, so a violation must match the legal definition of a derived work. SCO has a flock of lawyers trying to prove a similar case that anything developed for Unix belongs to them regardless of who wrote it. Perhaps they'll be unemployed soon so someone could hire them to do even more damage to Linux with this line of argument. But unlike patents, copyright law says that something has to be copied to have a violation. If you could write a module with an interface definition (and there should be a fair-use argument if you couldn't - you might want to remember why *bsd and Linux are allowed to have compatible header files with Unix) then no copying happens. Also consider something like NDISwrapper. It's absurd to think that a binary NDIS driver written with no knowledge of the Linux kernel could violate it's copyright. If someone wanted to pursue the issue it might be possible to make module writers split their work into two parts - one provided in source and GPL'd that connects to the kernel interface and provides the interface to the binary portion - but I don't quite see the point. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
