![]() | |||||||||||
Messages in this thread |
On Tuesday 01 November 2005 16:43, Jeff V. Merkey wrote: > Alan Cox and others have publicly stated that drivers, if complied stand > alone with NO DEPENDENCIES ON KERNEL HEADERS (i.e. they do not > incorporate in any way any kernel headers or source code tagged GPL) do > not violate the GPL when provided with Linux. DSFS, NVidia, and several > folks build kernel modules which are stand alone and are not objected to > by the majority of folks. If you even take 2 minutes to actually inspect the NVIDIA video driver sources (extract the .run file with --extract-only, and cd to usr/src/nv) you'll find the "glue" which is provided as source, but not under the GPL, does indeed #include kernel headers at compile time. It does not distribute them, however, but it is completely nonsensical to class this as having "no dependency". It has a compile time and runtime dependency on the current kernel. What driver wouldn't? > If these drivers include kernel headers as part of the build, then the > drivers violate the GPL. Period. Check the code. If the vendor is > including **ANY** GPL kernel headers, then they are required to open > source the drivers. There are some zealots and GPL bigots that disagree > with this, but Linux folks seem to be reasonable on this point. There's clearly a grey area here, but I have no understanding of the law so I will not comment beyond stating fact. But you are at least wrong about the NVIDIA driver. -- Cheers, Alistair. 'No sense being pessimistic, it probably wouldn't work anyway.' Third year Computer Science undergraduate. 1F2 55 South Clerk Street, Edinburgh, UK. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ | ||||||||||
| Last update: 2005-11-01 20:18 [from the cache] ©2003-2008 | |||||||||||