Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
On Fri, 23 Oct 2009, Kyle McDonald wrote:
Along these lines, it's always struck me that most of the
restrictions of the GPL fall on the entity who distrbutes the 'work'
in question.
A careful reading of GPLv2 shows that restrictions only apply when
distributing binaries.
I would thinkthat distributing the source to a separate original work
for a module, leaves that responsibility up to who-ever compiles it
and loads it. This means the end-users, as long as they never
distribute what they create, are (mostly?) unaffected by the Kernel's
GPL, and if they do distribute it, the burden is on them.
If the end user builds from source then there are no GPL license
issues whatsoever. This is the nature of "free" software.
Arguably that line might even be shifted from the act of compiling
it, to the act of actually loading (linking) it into the Kernel, so
that distributing a compiled module might even work the same way. I'm
not so sure about this though. Presumably compiling it before
distribution would require the use of include files from the kernel,
and that seems a grey area to me. Maybe clean room include files
could be created?
This is where the lawyers get involved. :-)
There are a few vendors who have managed to distribute proprietary
drivers as binaries for Linux. Nvidia is one such vendor.
Exactly. I can think of several Companies that do the same.
Packaging it in a single kernel RPM, might be too close for comfort, but
packaging it in it's own optionally installed RPM, and including that on
the distribution DVD should also be safe - There is a cluase that allows
non-GPL works to be distributed on the same media.
-Kyle
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us,
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
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