--- Luke -Jr [email protected] wrote:
On Thursday 03 April 2008, Leo Mauler wrote:
--- Luke -Jr [email protected] wrote:
On Thursday 03 April 2008, Jeffrey Watts wrote:
All significant parties - the guy that wrote the GPL, the guy that wrote Linux
- say what nVidia is doing is okay, and
that the issue isn't what they are doing, but is instead a limitation of the license itself.
Greg, the guy I quoted earlier, is a Linux developer and copyright holder. Furthermore, none of the developers nor RMS are IP lawyers. The only citation of IP lawyers thus far in this discussion has been that binary modules are illegal.
There's a legal term which you should become aware of: "estoppel". In general it protects a party who would suffer detriment if:
- The defendant has done or said something to
induce an expectation
- The plaintiff relied (reasonably) on the
expectation...
- ...and would suffer detriment if that
expectation were false.
In linux/COPYING we read that Linus has created an expectation that his copyright doesn't make binary drivers illegal simply through making system calls:
linux/COPYING says: "This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work"."
Again, nVidia's blobs are neither user programs nor merely use system calls.
Actually that isn't true. nVidia's driver uses a GPL'd "shim" or "wrapper", which means that the GPL'd wrapper makes all the system calls, and the nVidia driver makes calls only to the GPL'd wrapper.
Since Linus, and your favorite kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, have already signed off on giving ndiswrapper back its GPL status, it would seem that the "GPL wrapper for non-GPL code" option is alive and well and ACKNOWLEDGED BY GREG KROAH-HARTMAN. Which, again, makes his comments about "closed source binary-only Linux kernel modules are illegal" the FUD they've always been.
http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/testing/ChangeLog-2.6.25-rc4
(or http://tinyurl.com/2rxltg)
| commit 9b37ccfc637be27d9a652fcedc35e6e782c3aa78 | Author: Pavel Roskin [email protected] | Date: Thu Feb 28 17:11:02 2008 -0500 | | module: allow ndiswrapper to use GPL-only | symbols | | A change after 2.6.24 broke ndiswrapper | by accidentally removing its access to GPL-only | symbols. Revert that change and add comments | about the reasons why ndiswrapper and | driverloader are treated in a special way. | | Signed-off-by: Pavel Roskin [email protected] | Acked-by: Greg KH [email protected] | Acked-by: Ingo Molnar [email protected] | Cc: Rusty Russell [email protected] | Cc: Jon Masters [email protected] | Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds | [email protected]
Greg saw the change and acknowledged the change. Greg has thus given nVidia and any distribution which uses nVidia drivers (which use ndiswrapper-like wrappers to allow non-GPL'd code to work as legal Linux kernel modules) all the "estoppel" they'll ever need in court.
This exception is not applicable to them.
This is also immaterial because the GPL merely refers to "derived works", and Linus has already delivered an opinion that nVidia's binary-only drivers aren't "derived works":
http://kerneltrap.org/?q=node/1735
"I think the NVidia people can probably reasonably honestly say that the code they ported had _no_ Linux origin. But quite frankly, Id be less inclined to believe that for some other projects out there.."
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