Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Fri, 16 Feb 2007 23:44:35 +1000 | From | "Trent Waddington" <> | Subject | Re: GPL vs non-GPL device drivers |
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On 2/16/07, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu> wrote: > As others have pointed out, NVidia and ATI think they're in an OK spot with > the way *they* do *their* module,
Man, your sentence is so vague here that I almost don't feel the need to correct you, almost. I don't think NVIDIA or ATI think they can get away with distributing a binary only kernel module because of any of the technical measures they take to seperate themselves from the kernel code.. That's done for good technical reasons, they ship *BSD drivers too.
I think the reason why they feel safe that no-one will sue them (and no company wants to be sued, even big ones by individual kernel developers) is because so few kernel developers have actually sued anyone for writing proprietary drivers.
So here's my message to VJ, from a legal standpoint: don't worry about it. No-one who authored code you're linking your code against is likely to go on a suing spree anytime soon, they're too busy coding.
You've already got my message from a moral point of view (and I'm still terribly confused about your reply).
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