From: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 21:48:58 +1000
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Cc: Patrick McFarland <diablod3@gmail.com>,
       Stefan Richter <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de>,
       Anonymous User <anonymouslinuxuser@gmail.com>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: GPL Violation?
In-Reply-To: message from Alan Cox on Thursday August 17
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On Thursday August 17, alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk wrote:
> Ar Iau, 2006-08-17 am 05:36 -0400, ysgrifennodd Patrick McFarland:
> > > If a driver author doesn't want 
> > > to publish under the terms of GPL, an implementation in userspace may
> > > make it possible to avoid linking with GPL code.
> > 
> > But doesn't that force the GPL code to rely on closed source code, and not 
> > function properly without it? I remember a part in the GPL about not allowing 
> > that, but I can't seem to find it atm.
> 
> It shouldn't generally be a grey area but that is why the Linux kernel
> has always had this clarification in COPYING about the interpretation
> 
>   NOTE! 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".
>  Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software
>  Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux
>  kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.


Hmmm. I wonder what "normal" system calls are.  And how they contrast
to "abnormal" system calls, which presumably aren't covered by the
above note.
I wonder if reading and writing to files in /sys and /proc are
'normal' in this context or not.  Certainly I think that non-standard
ioctls could be considered to abnormal.

I guess that's one for the lawyers :-)

NeilBrown
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