Re: [linux-audio-user] Interesting Tidbit: The Midas XL8 uses Linux

On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 17:51 -0500, Jan Depner wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-06-11 at 13:34 -0400, Lee Revell wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-06-11 at 01:29 -0500, Jan Depner wrote:
> > > That's the consensus among kernel people. Not lawyers. Take it to
> > > court first. It has zero chance in that venue.
> >
> > Can you cite any precedents?
> >
> > The kernel people I am referring to have talked to their lawyers about
> > it and the consensus is that a driver is a derived work of the OS that
> > it is developed for.
> >
>
> If the driver is part of the kernel then that is true. If it is a
> module then it isn't. The whole thing is moot though until someone
> takes it to court. I seriously doubt that anyone will be willing to try
> to win that battle when they face the possibility of losing and being
> counter sued for court and legal costs.
>

Built-in vs. module is irrelevant - modules are linked into the kernel
at runtime.

See:

http://kerneltrap.org/node/4674
http://lwn.net/2001/1025/a/module-license.php3
http://lwn.net/Articles/154602/

>
> > Look at some driver source some day - it's basically impossible to write
> > a driver without using any kernel APIs - driver model, spinlocks, etc.
> >
>
> My understanding of the NVIDIA driver is that it uses an open module
> to work with a closed module (BLOB). What you have been saying is that
> the intent of the vendor to only develop the closed module for Linux
> makes it a violation of the GPL and this is obviously not true. There
> is no infringement in the closed module. They're not using any GPL'ed
> code. This is why we have binary modules now. At any rate, as I said
> above, until someone wants to take it to court it doesn't matter.
> NVIDIA will continue to make closed drivers and so will other vendors.
>

As I've stated many times I am not talking about the nvidia driver.
That is legal because the binary part cannot be a derived work as it was
developed for another OS.

Lee
Received on Tue Jun 13 08:15:02 2006