Invitation to ubuntu developers
Matthew Garrett
mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org
Sun Nov 26 14:35:42 GMT 2006
On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 10:53:07AM +0000, David Hart wrote:
> He's completely wrong about circumventing the GPL.
>
> Taken from Section 2 of http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html is the
> following:
(snip GPL)
> The Ubuntu distribution is an aggregation of software.
Many (most, in fact) of the upstream kernel developers hold that kernel
modules are inevitably derived works of the kernel, and therefore must
be released under a GPL-compatible license. In Ubuntu, we attempt to
avoid that issue with a technicality - non-free kernel drivers are
shipped as independent object files, which are then linked at boot time.
As a result, we don't break the license, since the boot-time linking is
use rather than distribution.
In theory, anyway. If non-free kernel modules are a violation of the
letter of the GPL, then what we're doing is pretty clearly a violation
of (at least) the spirit. It's certainly won us no friends in the
upstream kernel community.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org
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