Les Mikesell wrote: > I thought you were suggesting that people had a choice > of license terms when submitting changes. The terms make > it very clear that they don't. Actually, I understand that there are parts of the kernel (usually drivers) that are available under both the GPL and the new BSD license. This usually happens when someone wants support for a particular bit of hardware in Linux and in the BSD kernels, and is prepared to write *a* driver. He could then submit it to both communities under the appropriate license for each community, but that would mean that he couldn't easily take fixes from the Linux version of the driver and put it into the BSD one. So the dual-license is the normal answer. This *is* generally considered to be permissible under copyright law, since it's the copyright owner who is giving extra permissions to use his "intellectual property", and once a driver has been ported to BSD, that port is no longer considered to be derivative of Linux. (Of course, the author can't take any GPL-only code or headers with him.) It's the same argument that allowed IBM to take code from Dynix/ptx (which they own) and put it into Linux -- once it's been ported to Linux, it's no longer a derivative of System V. It would be possible for a later maintainer to decide she didn't want to support the BSD version and remove the BSD license. Future versions (but not previous versions) of the Linux driver would then be GPL only. This rarely happens. See, for example: http://lwn.net/Articles/169825/ http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/kernel-mentors/2005-July/000344.html This also means that there are parts of the Linux kernel which Microsoft *could* legally port to Windows. James. -- E-mail: james@ | Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time aprilcottage.co.uk | -- Alan Moore, "Very Short Story" | http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html
