Hello, A GPL troll, as the "Vicious Nokia Employee [that got] VLC Removed from Apple App Store" I cannot resist... Le mercredi 30 novembre 2011 19:23:26 Devin Heitmueller, vous avez écrit : > 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. If you have any doubt, I would suggest you ask the SFLC. They tend to give valuable insights into that sort of problems. It might be intricate and/or not what you want to hear from them though (Been there done that). > 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. As long as the distributed binaries do not include any GPL-incompatible code (presumably from Microsoft), there should be no GPL contamination problem. So it boils down to whether the driver binary has non-GPL code in it. I don't see how the license of the Windows code is relevant, so long as NetUp is not distributing the Windows OS alongside the driver (or vice versa). And while I do not know the Windows DDK license, I doubt it cares much about the driver license, so long as Microsoft does not need to distribute nor certify the driver. There may however be problems with the toolchain. The driver binary must be recompilable with just the GPL'd source code and "anything that is normally distributed with the operating system". VisualStudio is not distributed with Windows. In fact, it is sold as a separate product, except for restrictive freeware versions. So unless this driver can be compiled with a GPL-compatible toolchain (and the toolchain is provided by NetUp), it might not be possible to distribute binary copies of the driver. Then again, I am not a laywer. Someone that cares, please ask SFLC or friends. -- Rémi Denis-Courmont http://www.remlab.net/ http://fi.linkedin.com/in/remidenis -- 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
