Siegbert Baude wrote:
Let me first say, that I perfectly understand the wish for open specs for open drivers. [...] So what was never judged in front of a court was the "derived work" part of the GPL. The interpretation of some kernel folks (again there are also contradicting opinions over there) is (in nice words) very "embracing". [...] As long as no court has said was is fact in this case and what is not, nobody should argue that the "GPL forces proprietary drivers to be thrown out". And as long as there is no illegal action, also distributing cannot be forbidden. [...] My personal opinion is, there is just an abuse of the GPL in order to force hardware vendors to open specs by social pressure. The GPL never wanted to forbid any use of software together with GPLed code or you could never use any other non-GPL programs on top of your GPL-kernel. The purpose of the GPL is to get modified code back, which is the real interpretation of "derived work". And therefore, if there is some non-derived work it should be o.k. to use it together with GPLed code independent of using syscalls vs. header files. Non-derived in a sensible manner means that the biggest part of the work was done without using anything of GPLed code, which for me is clearly the case for graphics card drivers. [...]
I am in complete agreement with this statement! Cheers, Th. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org