Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932805AbWLNPfT (ORCPT ); Thu, 14 Dec 2006 10:35:19 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932806AbWLNPfT (ORCPT ); Thu, 14 Dec 2006 10:35:19 -0500 Received: from thunk.org ([69.25.196.29]:60543 "EHLO thunker.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932805AbWLNPfR (ORCPT ); Thu, 14 Dec 2006 10:35:17 -0500 Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:53:16 -0500 From: Theodore Tso To: David Woodhouse Cc: Linus Torvalds , Greg KH , Jonathan Corbet , Andrew Morton , Martin Bligh , "Michael K. Edwards" , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: GPL only modules [was Re: [GIT PATCH] more Driver core patches for 2.6.19] Message-ID: <20061214145315.GB9079@thunk.org> Mail-Followup-To: Theodore Tso , David Woodhouse , Linus Torvalds , Greg KH , Jonathan Corbet , Andrew Morton , Martin Bligh , "Michael K. Edwards" , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <20061214003246.GA12162@suse.de> <22299.1166057009@lwn.net> <20061214005532.GA12790@suse.de> <1166084480.5253.849.camel@pmac.infradead.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1166084480.5253.849.camel@pmac.infradead.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.12-2006-07-14 X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: tytso@thunk.org X-SA-Exim-Scanned: No (on thunker.thunk.org); SAEximRunCond expanded to false Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2329 Lines: 45 >But I would ask that they honour the licence on the code I release, and >perhaps more importantly on the code I import from other GPL sources. It's not a question of "honoring the license"; it's a matter of what is the reach of the license, as it relates to derivitive works. It's a complicated subject, and very dependent on the local law; certainly in the U.S., when I asked a Law Professor from the MIT Sloan School of Management, who specialized in IP issues about the FSF theory of GPL contamination by dynamic linking, after I explained all the details of how dynamic linking work, she told me that it would be "laughed out of the courtroom". Now, is that a legal opinion? No, because the facts of every single case are different, and it was an opinion from someone over a decade ago, and case law may have changed (although as far as I know, there has been no court ruling directly on this particular point since then). The bottom line though is that it is not _nearly_ so clear as some people would like to believe. There is a lot of gray --- and that's a GOOD thing. If copyright contamination via dynamic linking was the settled law of the land, then all of the Macintosh extensions that people wrote --- WHICH WORK BY PATCHING THE OPERATING SYSTEM --- would be illegal. And given how much Apple hated people implying that the UI as handed down from the mountain by the great prophet Steve Jobs wasn't good enough, would we really have wanted Apple hounding developers with lawsuits just because "they weren't honoring the license" by daring to patch MacOS, and extending the OS by linking in their code? And what about people who link in a debugger into the Microsoft HAL or other Microsoft DLL's in order to reverse engineer USB drivers for Linux or reverse engineer protocols for Samba --- that's dynamic linking of a sort too --- should that be illegal as well? Imagine the power that Microsoft could put into their EULA if copyright contamination could be as easily achieved by dynamic linking. Please, let's try to have a little sanity here, - Ted - 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/