[sldev] [legal] Armchair lawyers

Callum Lerwick seg at haxxed.com
Mon Apr 9 12:53:27 PDT 2007


On Mon, 2007-04-09 at 01:29 -0700, John Hurliman wrote:
> Callum Lerwick wrote:
> >
> > The GPL is *bulletproof*.
> >   
> Then why are there closed source kernel drivers available from NVidia, 
> Cisco, and others? Feel free to e-mail me privately or go to a wiki 
> discussion, as this licensing talk is making several peoples eyes bleed.

Because they were sort-of allowed early on, Linus arguing that AFS was
not a derived work, and now the camel is in the tent. Many kernel
developers would love nothing more than to put a stop to the
proliferation of closed source kernel modules. Don't go thinking there
hasn't been volumes of argument amongst top kernel developers on this
very topic.

Some background, Linus Torvalds, 2003:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/1735
The big argument, 2006:
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3501846795.html

Also of interest, along the lines of what Phoenix said:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/5/18/234

Lack of enforcement does not make the GPL any less bulletproof.
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