Russ Allbery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Stephen Gran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> This one time, at band camp, Thomas Bushnell BSG said:
>
>>> Except, they *are* loaded together.
>
>>> Making "shim" libraries does not change the licensing rules at all,
>>> which for the GPL, apply to the complete program.
>
>> So then how is it that the NVidia drivers and so forth aren't illegal?
>> This is precisely how many non-free or GPL incompatible applications
>> communicate with GPL'ed ones.
>
> Because the Linux kernel adds an additional clause, in the form of a
> statement of the author's interpretation of the license, saying that such
> modules are okay.
Are you saying that the NVIDIA driver for Linux is a user
program, not a kernel module? (I do not know for sure because I
have never had cause to download or install it.) Here is the
clarification included in the COPYING file distributed with the
Linux kernel. It does not talk about kernel modules at all, only
about system calls made by user programs.
NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel
services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use
of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".
Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software
Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux
kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.
Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel
is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not
v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.
Linus Torvalds
--
"...In the UNIX world, people tend to interpret `non-technical user'
as meaning someone who's only ever written one device driver."
--Daniel Pead
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