On Fri, 11 Jun 2010, Freddie Cash wrote:
I don't mean to be a PITA, but I'm assuming that someone lawyerly
has had the appropriate discussions with the porting team about how
linking against the GPL'd Linux kernel means your kernel module has
to be GPL-compatible. It doesn't matter if you distribute it
outside the general kernel source tarball, what matters is that
you're linking against a GPL program, and the old GPL v2 doesn't
allow for a non-GPL-compatibly-licensed module to do that.
GPL is a distribution license, not a usage license. You can
manually download all the GPL and non-GPL code you want, so long as
you do it separately from each other. Then you can compile them all
into a single binary on your own system, and use it all you want on
that system. The GPL does not affect anything that happens on that
system. If you try to copy those binaries off to use on another
system, then the GPL kicks in and everything breaks down.
IOW, the GPL has absolutely no bearing on what you compile and run
on your system ... so long as you don't distribute the code and/or
binaries together.
I am really sad to hear you saying these things since if it was all
actually true, then Linux, *BSD, and Solaris distributions could not
legally exist. Thankfully, only part of the above is true.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
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