praisetazio wrote:
Alle 02:05, sabato 24 gennaio 2004, Carlos E. R. ha scritto:
The Friday 2004-01-23 at 01:01 +0100, Anders Johansson wrote:
I think you'll find most of the base stuff, like glibc, is LGPL. Note that apps like Oracle's database, Lotus Domino and other "up-market" stuff isn't GPLed. You can get pretty far by using the LGPL stuff.
What happens for a kernel module? To use a pci card, you need to develop a kernel module. For example, Nvidia drivers I understand have a part that is open source (and needs to be recompiled for each kernel version), but another is completely closed - that makes the kernel say it is tainted, isn't it? How does NVidia do it?
Just curious.
-- Cheers, Carlos Robinson
I read an interview to Linus about that. He said that a driver developed from scratch, the kernel licence needs that driver to be GPL, otherwise, if the code is ported , there is no need for the driver to be GPL. Nvidia drivers are ported from Windows to Linux, so they can remain closed source.
Praise
This leads to the slippery slope of defining exactly what "ported code" means. If I have to rewrite 70% of the ported code to make it work in a gcc environment using GPL'ed header files, am I violating the GPL if I only supply the binary to my client? This is one of the gray areas I'm having trouble with. What if the code that was ported never really worked in the first place?