>> In the case of a NDIS driver, the driver itself is without doubt NOT >> a derived work on the linux kernel. > >Yes, but the combination of the driver with the kernel is a derived >work of the kernel, and it's not a case of "mere aggregation", which >the GPL permits.
people here are not understanding me at all. I'll try to be more clear: My position about Mr. Reiser's change of licensing: 1. The new license is GPL-incompatible. This is not a problem. He said -- and I'll believe in his good faith -- that the kernel patch is not to be licensed according to it, but GPL'd. OK. 1 (a) reiser4progs can be considered to be derivative of the reiser4 patch, but not a derivative of the kernel. I repeat: this is OK. 2. The new license has the possibility of being considered a non-DFSG-free license because he is -- not really severely, but seriously -- stopping creation of /some/ derived works. He does it to stop what he -- erroneously, IMHO -- called "plagiarism". I'll refer to it as "aggressive rebranding". This is an unfortunate problem, in that would get reiser4progs (and maybe reiserfsprogs) out of main, with all the disadvantages that incur. 2 (a) Now, we should think: does Debian /need/ to aggresively rebrand, removing the credits -- which Mr. Reiser state are part of his revenue generation? Take in consideration the excellent work namesys has been doing before answering. 2 (b) If the credits are to be considered for some reson prohibitively extensive, what could we do to continuing their display, summarizing them, to a point where it should be acceptable to Mr. Reiser? 2 (c) It has being a policy of the Debian Project, AFAIK, to comply with the wishes of upstream (and *not* gratuitously fork projects)... 3. In the light of what I consider in good faith answer to the points above, I suggest we politely request from Mr. Reiser that reverts his license to the GPL, with a request attached to it, whose terms would be something like: "altough this license grants you the rights to modify the package, according to your wishes, the original copyright holder requests that you don't modify the credits printed at [[insert the occasions when they are printed here]], or the code that makes them being printed, or obfuscate their output in any way. This is because those credits are part of our revenue stream generation, and only by preserving them you would assure that we can continue to produce and improve the high-quality software you are using. For the record, for this version the referred credits are: [[copy *all* of the credits here]] " This request would be honored, IMHO, by the Debian Project, and I think even RedHat and others would consider (after having their attention called to this discussion) including the full Namesys branding as opposed to losing reiserfs in the longer run. Besides, the full credits will be a *legitimate* part of the license text -- and as such, it would not be possible to ditch them anyway. In a more technical point, some Makefile magic should be enough to keep the copies of the credits in sync. :-) 4. The suggestion (3) above is the reason why I'm e-mailing this to the reiser*progs maintainers. 5. Now back to the top and the NDIS driver thingy: the combination of the NDIS driver and the kernel happens only in the user's machine... the NDIS driver is certainly undistributable by debian, it's in the disc present in the hardware box... and copyright gives the user the possibility of combining them. Hope to have helped, -- br, M -- http://www.fastmail.fm - Email service worth paying for. Try it for free