Ira Abramov wrote: > Quoting Ira Abramov, from the post of Thu, 30 Nov: > >> All Hypothetical... >> > > well, it was a little white lie, if you didn't suspect :-) > > After double checking my legal status in any case, it turns out I am not > under NDA at the time of this writing, but will be by the end of the > day, so I'll say this :-) > So you ignore my advice...... > the company in question (and those of you who know who they are, know), > Has promissed me to solve the issue. the problem was a proprietary > kernel module that should have tainted the kernel and recieved a > restricted set of symbols, but instead has a license string of "GPL is > not the license of this module" with a null character after the "GPL", > which is an ugly and unethical hack. > It's also, legally, on shaky grounds. They are, in essence, claiming that the module is GPL, while it isn't.
I think that the whole GPL only exports issue was not thoroughly thought through by people who should have thought about the legal implications of doing it. > I offered instead that they write a GPL module that allows access to > what they need in the kernel through IOCTLs and move their binary-only > blob to userspace. This was acceptable to them and I believe it's the > correct legal solution myself (correct me if I'm wrong) > Well, if you want to be sure, I would suggest that they try to do a couple of things: 1. Set in stone the kernel<->userspace API, and document it inside the kernel module. This also means that the API must not change when the kernel interfaces they export do. This is both a QA thing and a legal thing. 2. Try to make it as much a complete self-contained API as possible, preferably one that is useful to other people. They manage 1 and 2, they have a very good case for claiming that the userspace tool is not a derived work of their kernel space driver, and thus not bound by the kernel module's license. Shachar -- Shachar Shemesh Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd. Have you backed up today's work? http://www.lingnu.com/backup.html ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
