I am not a lawyer, so please don't rely on this as legal advice.
"Nemosoft" wrote, about his Philips web module:
>The source part is placed under the GPL;
Great! Thanks for writing it!
>AFAIK, it is allowed to link in
>binary stuff into the Linux kernel as an exception by Linus.
Linus does not own or have that kind of power for all of the
relevant copyrights. You may be confusing this situation with
the preamble of /usr/src/linux/COPYING that says that proprietary
user level programs are legal (although linking proprietary programs
against glibc's libio package can only be done only with "a gnu
compiler" according to the libio copying conditions).
>However, if I
>distribute the binary part as a module that you load separately, there are
>no issues at all.
>Since I would not limit distribution of such a module,
>distributors can decide to include the module on their CDs or not.
Even if the modules themselves contain no GPL'ed content,
there is some question as to whether proprietary Linux kernel modules
are legal in general (presumarly at least in the US), on the same
basis that NeXT eventually agreed to release the source code to their
separate proprietary .o files for objective C extensions to gcc.
However, what interferes with Linux distributions that
want to exclude or separately package GPL-incompatible material is
proprietary material in the stock kernel releases. Separately
distributing a proprietary kernel module does not cause that problem.
I'm not aware of anyone going to the expense of litigating against one of
of them or being advised by counsel that they would fail in such an effort.
Again, thanks for writing the Philips webcam driver. I look
forward to including the GPL'ed part in our build tree.
Adam J. Richter __ ______________ 4880 Stevens Creek Blvd, Suite 104
[EMAIL PROTECTED] \ / San Jose, California 95129-1034
+1 408 261-6630 | g g d r a s i l United States of America
fax +1 408 261-6631 "Free Software For The Rest Of Us."
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