On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 05:46:28PM -0600, Timur Tabi wrote: > 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. Bah, wrong argument. Microsoft explicitly allows you to create a closed source kernel driver. The Linux kernel does not allow you to do such a thing. In fact, numerous copyright holders of the Linux kernel (myself included) have explicitly stated that you are not allowed to do such a thing, and that would be very hard to defend against in court. So yes, trying to just put a "shim" module to get around the GPL symbols would be considered a direct infringment on the license (remember, loading a kernel module is "linking" the code together.) Your second module would be the infringing party. greg k-h -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
