T. Lodewick schrieb:
again thats _your_ according. not that of Novell / Suse as also other members of the list. and - and thats importend - in point of view of some courts in some countries ( in USA and germany, for example: in both countries the courts agreed against some hardware vendors that there closed-source-drivers violaited the GPL.
Please, stop spreading FUD. The judgments were about urging the manufacturer (network routers using iptables, IIRC)to give their modified GPL code to the public, which they held closed before. Nowhere are there 3rd party binaries involved.
so if they do, there should no legal way to offer them [kernel + driver] together. and it mid not your view that offering a distro [with kernel] in one folder of a server and closed-source-drivers in another folder is the same - but for the courts it is.)
So the kernel folks can tell what to host on your servers? Brave new GPL world. Can you please cite the court, which gave this judgment?
not every developer that is involved in the kernel, the modules etc. think about that way. there are a lot of discussions on the mailinglist about that topic. while some developers accept that there are closed-source-drivers, there are others that don't.
So you say yourself that the situation is not clear.
"same server = distro": the view of the courts ( in a realy short way ! ): if you offer access to a product A with licennce LIC_A and you offer also access to a product B that can only run on top of product A but hits the licence LIC_A you are violaiting the LIC_A. so it is the right of the holder of licence LIC_A that you don't offer access to both products A and B.
Please again, give some links or infos about which court said this. And just for your info, the binaries are not only to run on top of Linux kernel's GPL license, but also e.g. on top of BSD licensed FreeBSD kernel. So the first assumption is already wrong. Ciao Siegbert P.S.: And for nearly the last time, sorry for the double mail to Thomas. :-) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org