Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Wed, 12 Feb 2003 21:10:28 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Wed, 12 Feb 2003 21:10:28 -0500 Received: from bjl1.jlokier.co.uk ([81.29.64.88]:23424 "EHLO bjl1.jlokier.co.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Wed, 12 Feb 2003 21:10:26 -0500 Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 02:21:27 +0000 From: Jamie Lokier To: David Schwartz Cc: cfriesen@nortelnetworks.com, Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: Monta Vista software license terms Message-ID: <20030213022127.GB13897@bjl1.jlokier.co.uk> References: <3E4A6917.2030307@nortelnetworks.com> <20030212201840.AAA15967@shell.webmaster.com@whenever> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20030212201840.AAA15967@shell.webmaster.com@whenever> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1797 Lines: 42 David Schwartz wrote: > 1) I have all the rights to the difference between the original work > and the derived work. (Since I made the derived work, I must.) The logic of derivation does not work like that. You don't have all the rights to the difference. It is not a case of B = C - A. People do not own individual lines or bytes of the source code. (Sometimes they do, but often they don't). The "difference" between the original work and the derived work is _itself_ a derived work, because you can't possibly *create* a diff without deriving from the original work. In the act of you creating the diff you must have worked from the original GPL'd work, so the diff is derived from that, as well as from your original work. When you write "diff -ur orig-kernel my-kernel >file", the output from that command is a derived work of the orig-kernel directory. This is true even if you didn't copy any context lines from the original tree. That means your difference is covered by the GPL, even though you wrote the changes. (If you did manage to write the same diff working from other sources, or if the diff only makes "fair use" of the original, that would be different. But any large, complex diff such as a patch to the Linux VM simply cannot be written without starting from the original Linux VM code. It is a question of how well the glove fits the hand, as it were). (If the difference was just whole files using a well defined interface, such as a device driver or filesystem, your point seems quite applicable though.) -- Jamie - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/