Arjan van de Ven wrote:
btw this is a technical means to evade a license enforcement and may well run afoul of the DMCA laws in the united states.
also the intent is clear and thus is probably going to land you in a lot more legal trouble than having just a binary module.
Ok, then just change my_symbol_get() to do a whole bunch more stuff than just calling symbol_get(). You also couldn't call it my_symbol_get() any more, because that would just be too obvious.
No court would ever rule that a driver is a "derived work" of the kernel it links to. Otherwise, you could then argue every Windows driver would be a derivation of Windows, and therefore Microsoft would own the copyright to every Windows driver. As you can imagine, we'd have a thousand Windows IHVs screaming bloody murder if that were to happen. Even Microsoft would be opposed to that.
So since a driver isn't a derivation of the kernel, then it doesn't have to have the same license. There'd be no legal requirement to make any module GPL. Also, copyright isn't a factor, so the DMCA doesn't apply.
For the record, I don't really give a damn about any of this. My company's driver is GPL, so this whole thing is an academic exercise for me.
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