> The GPL does not come into play until you > *redistribute* a derivative work. > > > For all the rest (when you start redistributing), > consult a lawyer.
In other words, people have argued both sides of this; playing it safe means "if in doubt, don't"; and it's _your_ responsibility to Do The Right Thing, and thus to find out just what that might be, and nobody else's lawyer can help you with that. I tend to think this is a bogus argument anyway, since all drivers would need at least some porting; some more than others. Most of the kernel-to-driver interfaces are too different between Linux and Solaris; and AFAIK Linux makes no particular commitment to keep those stable, so one couldn't expect to easily stay in sync with their code, anyway. Filesystems (if performance weren't too much of an issue) could eventually be done in user space with FUSE, which would probably side-step the licensing issue. For most other drivers, I suppose one could do a clean-room document existing/create new from documentation. Or find a BSD-licensed driver and port that instead. There probably are cases where it would be faster/cheaper to port a Linux driver if that were possible, but I guess there aren't many of them; perhaps even fewer given that the Linux drivers may not be of a consistent quality. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
