On Feb 9, 2008 5:13 PM, Christer Weinigel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > But lets say that the b-tree code uses Linux-only primitives such as > kmalloc or spinlocks, and that I wrote the code specifically for the > Linux kernel, does that make it into a derivative work? > > What if I do a trivial replace of the kmalloc calls with malloc and the > spinlock calls with pthread locks instead, has my code been forever > tainted by being written for Linux so that I can't do that anymore? > What if I go the other way and write my code using the posix functions > to begin with and do the equally trivial replace of malloc with > kmalloc?
As the copyright owner, you're free to distribute the original parts as you wish as long as it doesn't contain anything that is derived work. So, when you remove those kmalloc/spin_lock calls, you're _obviously not_ tainted. But that doesn't mean you're free to distribute it when it _does_ contain derived work. Besides, a device driver can't even be compared to something as trivial as b-tree implementation that uses kmalloc/spin_lock in terms of "is it derived work or not." Thanks for the straw man, though! -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
