Cisco Cisco IPICS Release 2.1 Lizenzinformationen
Open Source Used In Cisco Instant Connect 4.10(1)
2320
work of the kernel (and thus fall under the GPL)?
THAT is a gray area, and _that_ is the area where I personally believe
that some modules may be considered to not be derived works simply because
they weren't designed for Linux and don't depend on any special Linux
behaviour.
Basically:
- anything that was written with Linux in mind (whether it then _also_
works on other operating systems or not) is clearly partially a derived
work.
- anything that has knowledge of and plays with fundamental internal
Linux behaviour is clearly a derived work. If you need to muck around
with core code, you're derived, no question about it.
Historically, there's been things like the original Andrew filesystem
module: a standard filesystem that really wasn't written for Linux in the
first place, and just implements a UNIX filesystem. Is that derived just
because it got ported to Linux that had a reasonably similar VFS interface
to what other UNIXes did? Personally, I didn't feel that I could make that
judgment call. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but it clearly is a gray
area.
Personally, I think that case wasn't a derived work, and I was willing to
tell the AFS guys so.
Does that mean that any kernel module is automatically not a derived work?
HELL NO! It has nothing to do with modules per se, except that non-modules
clearly are derived works (if they are so central to the kenrel that you
can't load them as a module, they are clearly derived works just by virtue
of being very intimate - and because the GPL expressly mentions linking).
So being a module is not a sign of not being a derived work. It's just
one sign that _maybe_ it might have other arguments for why it isn't
derived.
Linus
Date:Wed, 3 Dec 2003 16:23:33 -0800 (PST)
From:Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
To:Kendall Bennett
cc:linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Linux GPL and binary module exception clause?
On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>