--- Luke -Jr [email protected] wrote:
On Tuesday 08 April 2008, you wrote:
*sigh*
http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj19.htm
Lawyers! Giving legal advice without money! Looks like they specialize in this stuff! Sweet!
Interesting how they cite, but ignore this part: A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a ''derivative work''.
How is a "plug-in" or "driver" any different from an elaboration?
Look up "fair use" provisions in Copyright Law sometime. The basic premise of "fair use" is that a work can use a small portion of another work without requiring permission from the copyright holder.
The dinky bit of Linux header file code used to create the nVidia driver wrapper is so small that it most likely fits within the provisions of "fair use" and thus device drivers aren't elaborations.
But in any case, Greg KH is not a lawyer. These folks are lawyers. And they state that it is possible to create a LEGAL closed-source kernel module:
"Derivative works are not going to encompass plug-ins and device drivers that are designed to be linked from other off-the-shelf, unmodified, programs. If Linux is designed to accept separately-designed plug-in programs, you dont create a derivative work by merely running such a program under Linux, even if you have to look at the Linux source code to learn how to do so."
Greg KH says that lawyers have told Greg that closed-source kernel modules are all illegal, but Greg can't verify his statement". These actual lawyers state that Greg's claims about closed-source kernel modules are WRONG. Personally, I'll take the opinion of the lawyer over the non-lawyer in matters of law.
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