Gilad Ben-Yossef wrote:
>Hi,
>
>When you read the following, bare in mind one thing: I am not a lawyer
>and I don't even play one on TV. Having said that, I did investiage this
>issue quite a lot for reasons very similar to yours.
>
I am not a lawyer either. Furthermore - noone in my family is a lawyer.
I will therefor put all legal considerations aside for a moment and
raise another concern when releasing binary-only kernel modules by a
commercial company.
When you are even considering it, it is pretty clear that you are doing
so on behalf of a commercial company, who will later want to make money
from this development. There are two cases that I can think of:
A. You are trying to sell a complete solution, by which you intend to
sell hardware, OS, and your own binaries. In this case you have complete
control over both kernel used and OS, and there are no further technical
considerations. You do need to bear in mind, however, that you are not
allowed to perform changes to the kernel itself.
B. You are trying to creat an Off The Shelf product. In that case, most
companies tend to not really support Linux, but rather support RedHat
(and you can't really blame them). If that is the case, bear in mind
that you are 100% at RedHat's mercy. If tomorow they release a new
kernel, and they patch it in some way that breaks compatibility with
your module, you need to support that. If their patch makes your product
incompatible with the standard kernel, you need to face these
consequences. The company I work for (which, for reasons similar to
yours, I will not disclose) faced such a problem. As a result, the
product only works on RedHat. You cannot run it on custom compiled kernels.
One possible solution to this problem is to create a linking layer
between your module and the kernel, and make that layer GPL. This allows
anyone who wants to run a crazy kernel of their own to make sure they
can still work with your product, but it does mean that you are
revealing some information about your proprietry code (interfaces to the
kernel, to be exact). Like I said before - I am not a lawyer, and so I
don't know how that improves (if at all) your situation in terms of GPL
compliance. It probably doesn't change it one whit, but like I said,
there are strong technical reasons to favour such an approach.
Shachar
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