On Sat, 9 Feb 2008 17:41:00 +0200 "Pekka Enberg" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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. Ok good. > 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. So it magically becomes a derived work if I do a: #define malloc(n) kmalloc(n, 0) #define pthread_mutex_lock(l) spin_lock(l) at the beginning of the file? My guess is that it is much to trivial to be considered a creative expression and thus would not be covered by copyright. Meaning it would not be a derivative 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." A device driver isn't that hard either. I can write a device driver with a hand tied behind my back, to write a good balancing tree, I'd have to spend a lot more time reading up on algorithms. So "trivial" is a matter of background. And once again, I don't believe API copyrights are valid, because in that case Wine would have been sued out of the water a long time ago. > Thanks for the straw man, though! *sigh* Now you're just being insulting. /Christer -- 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/
