On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 11:40:15PM +0200, Bruce Allen wrote: > On Linux, device drivers are executable code blocks that can be > dynamically loaded into the running kernel. This is essentially the > same mechanism by which a running program loads a library. The kernel > (GPL in the case of Linux) has to load a '.ko' object file. If this is > (for example) a proprietary device driver from NVIDIA, this would appear > to violate GPL as you have described it.
There are people who do think this is a GPL violation. But this is a grey area and nobody so far has sued Nvidia. So until there is such a case and the court decides, all opinions are just guesses. See e.g. the thread starting at http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0608.2/0405.html. It also contains some references to other discussions. But the most important thing to consider is written in the second mail in the thread: "you should talk to a lawyer". Gabor -- --------------------------------------------------------- MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute Hungarian Academy of Sciences --------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ boinc_dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_dev To unsubscribe, visit the above URL and (near bottom of page) enter your email address.
