On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 1:02 PM, Andreas Oberritter <obi@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Am I the only one who thinks this is a legally ambigious grey area? >> Seems like this could be a violation of the GPL as the driver code in >> question links against a proprietary kernel. > > Devin, please! Are you implying that the windows kernel becomes a > derived work of the driver, or that it's generally impossible to publish > windows drivers under the terms of the GPL? The simple answer is that "I don't know". I'm not a lawyer (and as far as I know, neither are you). Nor have I researched the topic to significant lengths. That said though, whether it was the intention of either copyright holder it's entirely possible that the two software licenses are simply incompatible. For example, while both the Apache group and the FSF never really intended to prevent each others' software from being linked against each other, the net effect is still that you cannot redistribute such software together since the Apache license is incompatible with the GPL. >> I don't want to start a flame war, but I don't see how this is legal. >> And you could definitely question whether it goes against the >> intentions of the original authors to see their GPL driver code being >> used in non-free operating systems. > > The GPL doesn't cover such intentions. This isn't necessarily true. Anybody who has written a library and released it under the GPL instead of the LGPL has made a conscious decision that the library is only to be used by software that is GPL compatible. By their actions they have inherently forbidden it's use by non-free software. You could certainly make the same argument about a driver -- that they authors intent was to ensure that it only be linked against other free software. All this said, I don't really have a position one way or the other (I'm not a copyright holder on the drivers in question). But this issue doesn't seem as obvious as you would make it sound. Devin -- Devin J. Heitmueller - Kernel Labs http://www.kernellabs.com -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-media" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
