Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 26 May 2001 12:00:57 +0100 (BST) | From | James Sutherland <> | Subject | Re: Fwd: Copyright infringement in linux/drivers/usb/serial/keyspan*fw.h |
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On Fri, 25 May 2001, Adam J. Richter wrote: > Larry McVoy wrote: > >On Fri, May 25, 2001 at 07:34:57PM -0700, Adam J. Richter wrote:
> >It's also about the concept of boundaries - if you think that that > >concept is not a legal one then why aren't all programs which are run > >on top of a GPLed kernel then GPLed? > > Apparently Linus felt that that was a sufficiently > plausible gray area that he addressed it explicitly in > /usr/src/linux/COPYING: > > | NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel > | services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use > | of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work". > | Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software > | Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux > | kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.
Note the "derived work"; there is no way on this earth (or any other) that you could regard the device's firmware as being a "derived work" of the driver! AFAICS, the firmware is just a file served up to the device as needed - no more a derivative work from the kernel than my homepage is a derivative work of Apache.
James.
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