On 1/22/07, Luke -Jr [email protected] wrote:
Both.
Linus posted to the kerneltrap list: "I think the NVidia people can probably reasonably honestly say that the code they ported had _no_ Linux origin." ( http://kerneltrap.org/node/1735 ) If they had to write an interface layer for their existing driver code (which seems most likely) then it fits under non-derived. Writing code to interface to GPL code is certainly not the same as writing code that uses GPL code to function. Since the nVidia driver is closed, we don't know for sure, and under the DMCA, we aren't allowed to look at the binary driver to be sure.
No it doesn't. I mean the driver itself, not the binding.
Then see above and what the horses mouth says about it. ;)
WINE is not GPL'd, but even if it were, it would be a similar situation to ndiswrapper-- "GPL'd" software does exist built on the Win32 API.
For WINE to function it must make calls into all sorts of areas of GPL code.
Not quite.
WINE lets a Win32 program execute and intercepts Windows API function calls and translates them into Linux API calls, and vice versa. Much of the Linux API is GPL code. I'm sure we all know that. The userspace exception applies to the kernel, not GPL components running on top of the kernel. A program can run on top of the kernel in userspace and be clear of _kernel_ GPL restrictions, but what about the huge base of GPL code that makes up a distro? Linus has no say over that. That's what I mean when I write that it makes all sorts of calls into GPL code.
Linux specifically excludes userland from the GPL obligations. Even if it did not, the code itself is not technically linking to Linux until runtime if it has the potential to link against something else (for example, BSD) unmodified.
It also makes "tolerable" exceptions for kernel modules. Without the source code from the companies we don't know if they have GPL code in the driver and have to trust them to tell us they don't. Thus, most of what I read about is people theorizing about what might be in the driver and if it is a violation. From what is out there, I see that closed source is not a problem, so long as it contains no GPL code. The problem most people have with closed source is that they can't see the source to be sure that it really doesn't have any.
Jon.