from the libertarian newspaper

[Jon Pruente]

On 1/22/07, Luke -Jr <luke at dashjr.org> wrote:
> Both.

Linus posted to the kerneltrap list: "I think the NVidia people can
probably reasonably honestly say that the code they ported had _no_
Linux origin." ( http://kerneltrap.org/node/1735 ) If they had to
write an interface layer for their existing driver code (which seems
most likely) then it fits under non-derived.  Writing code to
interface to GPL code is certainly not the same as writing code that
uses GPL code to function.  Since the nVidia driver is closed, we
don't know for sure, and under the DMCA, we aren't allowed to look at
the binary driver to be sure.


> No it doesn't. I mean the driver itself, not the binding.

Then see above and what the horses mouth says about it. ;)

>
> > > WINE is not GPL'd, but even if it were, it would be a similar situation
> > > to ndiswrapper-- "GPL'd" software does exist built on the Win32 API.
> >
> > For WINE to function it must make calls into all sorts of areas of GPL
> > code.
>
> Not quite.

WINE lets a Win32 program execute and intercepts Windows API function
calls and translates them into Linux API calls, and vice versa.  Much
of the Linux API is GPL code.  I'm sure we all know that.  The
userspace exception applies to the kernel, not GPL components running
on top of the kernel.  A program can run on top of the kernel in
userspace and be clear of _kernel_ GPL restrictions, but what about
the huge base of GPL code that makes up a distro?  Linus has no say
over that.  That's what I mean when I write that it makes all sorts of
calls into GPL code.

> Linux specifically excludes userland from the GPL obligations. Even if it did
> not, the code itself is not technically linking to Linux until runtime if it
> has the potential to link against something else (for example, BSD)
> unmodified.

It also makes "tolerable" exceptions for kernel modules.  Without the
source code from the companies we don't know if they have GPL code in
the driver and have to trust them to tell us they don't.  Thus, most
of what I read about is people theorizing about what might be in the
driver and if it is a violation.  From what is out there, I see that
closed source is not a problem, so long as it contains no GPL code.
The problem most people have with closed source is that they can't see
the source to be sure that it really doesn't have any.

Jon.