On Sat, 2006-11-25 at 20:04, Peter Gordon wrote: > On Sat, 2006-11-25 at 17:05 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote: > > What does 'likely' mean? First you'd have to show that a device > > driver is a derived work from the kernel in copyright terms, since > > that is all that the GPL can cover - which is a pretty odd concept > > to begin with. > > Every device driver includes common kernel headers without which they > would be useless. This makes them derived works, as I understand it. Back when AT&T sued BSDI in '93 or so they weren't able to make the point that copying the header files (which Linux necessarily also duplicates on the user interface side) was copyright infringement. It doesn't make much sense to provide an interface and assert that the only possible way to use it is illegal. And I doubt that the GNU folks really want to encourage the idea of interface copyrights - or that they can get away with pretending that this is something else. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
