Microsofts new way of bashing Linux

[Lee Revell]

On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 23:08 -0400, Shawn McMahon wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 09:05:03PM -0400, Lee Revell said:
> > 
> > Besides, the legal consensus is that closed source Linux drivers are
> > illegal as they constitute a derived work of the Linux kernel.  This has
> > not been tested in court yet but it's only a matter of time.
> 
> That's nothing close a consensus.  There's rather a huge body of thought
> that says exactly the opposite, starting with Linus Torvalds

Care to provide a link?  Linus has gone on record saying that closed
source drivers developed for Linux are derivative works and this violate
the GPL.

>  and
> extending to an awful lot of lawyers for large companies that stand to
> lose a lot of money if they're wrong, and so wouldn't rush into it
> lightly.

If you're referring to Nvidia, their driver is probably legal because it
uses the same binary blob as the Windows driver and thus cannot be a
derivative work.

Lee