Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S265570AbTF2E0j (ORCPT ); Sun, 29 Jun 2003 00:26:39 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S265576AbTF2E0j (ORCPT ); Sun, 29 Jun 2003 00:26:39 -0400 Received: from rwcrmhc53.attbi.com ([204.127.198.39]:11966 "EHLO rwcrmhc13.attbi.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S265570AbTF2E0f (ORCPT ); Sun, 29 Jun 2003 00:26:35 -0400 Message-ID: <3EFE70E1.7020205@kegel.com> Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 21:53:53 -0700 From: Dan Kegel User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 X-Accept-Language: de-de, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: re: How to Avoid GPL Issue Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1192 Lines: 32 GC wrote: > We are trying to port a third party hardware driver into Linux kernel and > this third party vendor does not allow us to publish the source code. Is > there any approach that we can avoid publicizing the third party code while > porting to Linux? Do we need to write some shim layer code in Linux kernel > to interface the third party code? How can we do that? Is there any document > or samples? Xose replied: > You should begin reading 'Proprietary kernel modules' at > http://people.redhat.com/rkeech/pkm.html That's a very good summary. Xose pointed you to the right place, GC. Practically speaking, you can probably do what Nvidia does, but nobody on this list will support users who run into trouble loading your kernel module. In other words, you may not in fact be able to avoid the GPL issue... sorry... - Dan -- Dan Kegel http://www.kegel.com http://counter.li.org/cgi-bin/runscript/display-person.cgi?user=78045 - 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/