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There is an interesting situation that seemingly meets the GPL clause but is also used for developing proprietory drivers, and it works as under : Consider an organization A ( the Technical organization ) that is contracted with developing specific hardware & software for an organization B that happens to be the Navy. Also assume that both the organizations ( A & B ) are under the Ministry of Defence. Organization A now contracts me, a freelancer, for developing some linux kernel drivers for an embedded defence related project. I develop the drivers and hand them over to Organization A and clearly mark my code as GPL since I believe in the spirit of GPL. However, Organization A now bundles the code with the specially 'manufactured' hardware and sells it to their ONLY customer, Organization B ( The Navy ). Now, Organization B ( The Navy ) who is also the CUSTOMER, INSISTS that Organization A NOT REVEAL the source code to anybody else and this is agreed upon by Organization A since the software can ONLY work on the specific hardware supplied to the Navy and this is a highly classified project, and cannot/will not be sold to anyone else. Under this scenario, a) The software is GPL-ed b) No-one can get to see the software unless I the developer squeal. A 3rd party cannot pop-up and demand to see the software since the 3rd party is not a customer or in any way related to any transaction. c) If I squeal, I may disappear. Since I am paid for my hard work lets say I do not have any desire to squeal. Am I therefore right in assuming that this is a specific case where the open source nature of Linux is being used with great effect but the very nature of the licensing denies ANYONE ELSE from being a party to this transaction ? V. Radhakrishnan www.atr-labs.com On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 11:17 -0600, Chris Friesen wrote: > Fredrik Markström wrote: > > > At this point I feel that we have two possibilities, help our customer > > violate GPL or say no to the project. I'd prefer a third option where > > I could tell the customer that we can setup the project in a certain > > way (some "cleanroom" setup ?) to ensure that the results can not be > > considered derived work. > > > > Is your short answer also the definite answer considering this ? > > I'm not a lawyer, and you need to consult one. > > There isn't really a "definate answer" since it depends on copyright > law, which varies by region. The key question is whether the driver is > a derivative work of the kernel under copyright law. For the purposes > of copyright law this is primarily a legal question, not a technical one. > > There are some that claim that a driver written for another OS and > running in linux via a shim layer could qualify (especially if the > closed-source portion is written without any knowledge of linux > internals). Nvidia is one company that does this, but there are others > as well. > > Also, releasing the driver under the GPL doesn't necessarily mean > "released to the world". Technically, they would only need to provide > source code to their customers. Of course, their customers would be > free to redistribute, but it's unlikely that most of them would bother. > > Chris > -- > 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/ -- 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/ | ||||||||||||
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