On Sep 13, 06 18:53:32 +0200, T. Lodewick wrote:
but I have also written about an act between some kernel maintainer against a hardware vendor ( or to be more clear: a router vendor ) that has used code from iptable in his software. in that case the german court agreed with the maintainers, and give a clear statemend about the GPL and the german law. if you didn't read that, let me know, I can post the links again.
I vaguely remember that, and it was a completely different case. AFAIR what the router vendors did (there were several) was a pretty rock solid breach of the GPL. This is not perfectly clear in the binary driver situation. They do not ship GPL code without revealing the source.
I know that this ( using GPL-licenced code in closed source progarms) isn't the same then linking a ( closed sourced ) driver against a (GLP-licenced) kernel module it shows 2 importend views:
(should read before answering ;)
- the GPL is accepted at german courts so it is conform to german law - there are ways for the maintainers to get there rights at a (german) court
Nobody ever neglegted that.
I agree total with you that this all is a "gray zone" as you wrote. and I also agree with a lot of people on this list that there must be a solution for a) the users to don't get in conflict with the licence and make it easy for them to use a driver b) for the maintainer of distros to don't get also in conflict with a licence and to include as mutch drivers at needfull and c) also the kernel maintainer that there get the rights they have.
Ok, peace :) And world domination =)
I think we all agree that open-source drivers are to be preferred and might be the best solution. However, from my point of view the cheap propaganda that some people make against closed-source drivers does not help to solve the problem at all!
thats your point of view. I have another one. and others maybe have there owen. to name that views "cheap propaganda" is not realy nice, and with that your owen posts ends to the same: not nice "cheap propaganda" against people that believe more in open sourced drivers and it doesn't solve the problem at all too.
I agree here. The kernel developers have a valid point, and calling that
propaganda doesn't help anyone.
Matthias
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Matthias Hopf