On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 19:12 -0400, Lee Revell wrote: > On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 17:51 -0500, Jan Depner wrote: > > On Sun, 2006-06-11 at 13:34 -0400, Lee Revell wrote: > > > On Sun, 2006-06-11 at 01:29 -0500, Jan Depner wrote: > > > > That's the consensus among kernel people. Not lawyers. Take it to > > > > court first. It has zero chance in that venue. > > > > > > Can you cite any precedents? > > > > > > The kernel people I am referring to have talked to their lawyers about > > > it and the consensus is that a driver is a derived work of the OS that > > > it is developed for. > > > > > > > If the driver is part of the kernel then that is true. If it is a > > module then it isn't. The whole thing is moot though until someone > > takes it to court. I seriously doubt that anyone will be willing to try > > to win that battle when they face the possibility of losing and being > > counter sued for court and legal costs. > > > > Built-in vs. module is irrelevant - modules are linked into the kernel > at runtime. although i agree with almost everything lee has said here, i have to admit that the GPL leaves a gray (or grey) zone here. i think it likely that because drivers inevitably end up utilizing significant chunks of kernel infrastructure, they will be considered "derivative works" by a court, and this is the legal consensus so far across the GPL community. but the GPL does appear to leave room for run-time linkage against shared objects whose functionality is not "central" to the operation of the program. i've talked to RMS several times about this, and regrettably, GPL 3.0 so far does not appear to be clarifying the intent in this area. it is important that this be clarified, because it matters a great deal to any apps using media plugins in closed-sourced formats. for things like VST etc, Lee's point that the binary blob was written for a different platform is relevant, but consider the example of someone who wanted to write a non-GPL'ed backend for JACK, or if a VJ app provided a plugin API and someone want to write a non-GPL'ed plugin using it. in the case of the kernel, the number of copyright holders pretty much requires that any legal decision on the issue falls on the conservative side - much easier to say "drivers are derivative works" than say "drivers are not" and run into further legislation from specific copyright holders who object to the decision. --p
