On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 6:50 PM, Federico Lucifredi <[email protected]> wrote: > Okay, so IANL disclaimer in effect, but I have worked for several Linux > vendors as you guys know… and I did play ball with the licensing gurus :)
IANL as well, but I've been following free software licensing for a long time. > On May 29, 2012, at 4:51 PM, Tom Metro wrote: > >> Bill Bogstad wrote: >>> Tom Metro wrote: >>>> So I wonder why this situation doesn't result in a GPL violation. >> […] >> That's what I was led to believe - that simply dynamically loading a >> library didn't get around the linking restriction unless the code was >> licensed under LGPL. > > This is considered "a matter of interpretation" that changes depending whom > you ask. The purists believe that GPL are not licensed to link proprietary > modules (unless an express clause is added), but several vendors out there > consider loading proprietary modules okay with the GPL - with their legal > department's blessing. > > The issue is that the GPL does not say "linking", and so the question winds > up being "is a kernel module a derivative work of the GPLv2 Kernel, or not?" > > I believe the FSF considers loadable modules to a GPL program to require a > licensing exception. The Linux kernel maintainers do consider loadable > kernel modules derivative works, but "tolerate' proprietary modules as a way > to get drivers from the NVidias of the world, that consider the driver > technology itself part of their secret sauce (or too revealing of it to put > into the public's view). I wanted to refresh my memory about what kernel developers had said on this subject and went looking. I found some threads including Linus Torvalds. My impression is that Linus doesn't see being a loadable module says anything about being a derivative work (which is when the GPL would kick in). He explicitly talks about device drivers/filesystems which were written for other OSes and ported to Linux as not being derivative works in his mind. In the end, it comes down to what the copyright holder wants to assert and what the courts finally decide. As far as I know, no major kernel rights holders have attempted to assert anything in this area; so the courts have never had an opportunity to give us a definitive answer to this question. On a related note, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) announced today that they will be handling GPL related issues for the Samba project as well as as newly created project "GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers". http://sfconservancy.org/news/2012/may/29/compliance/ They claim to have seven Linux kernel developers who have joined this new Linux compliance project. Five other well known free software projects are also mentioned at the end of the announcement as having asked the SFC to handle license compliance issues as they come up in the future. If enough Linux developers with code in core parts of the kernel join this new compliance project then it is possible that binary modules will start to disappear. Bill Bogstad _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
