[HH] proprietary CPUs

[Bill Bogstad]

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 6:50 PM, Federico Lucifredi <flucifredi at acm.org> wrote:
> Okay, so IANL disclaimer in effect, but I have worked for several Linux vendors as you guys know… and I did play ball with the licensing gurus :)

IANL as well, but I've been following free software licensing for a long time.

> On May 29, 2012, at 4:51 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
>
>> Bill Bogstad wrote:
>>> Tom Metro wrote:
>>>> So I wonder why this situation doesn't result in a GPL violation.
>> […]
>> That's what I was led to believe - that simply dynamically loading a
>> library didn't get around the linking restriction unless the code was
>> licensed under LGPL.
>
> This is considered "a matter of interpretation" that changes depending whom you ask.  The purists believe that GPL are not licensed to link proprietary modules (unless an express clause is added), but several vendors out there consider loading proprietary modules okay with the GPL - with their legal department's blessing.
>
> The issue is that the GPL does not say "linking", and so the question winds up being "is a kernel module a derivative work of the GPLv2 Kernel, or not?"
>
> I believe the FSF considers loadable modules to a GPL program to require a licensing exception.  The Linux kernel maintainers do consider loadable kernel modules derivative works, but "tolerate' proprietary modules as a way to get drivers from the NVidias of the world, that consider the driver technology itself part of their secret sauce (or too revealing of it to put into the public's view).

I wanted to refresh my memory about what kernel developers had said on
this subject and went looking.   I found some threads including Linus
Torvalds.   My impression is that Linus doesn't see being a loadable
module says anything about being a derivative work (which is when the
GPL would kick in).   He explicitly talks about device
drivers/filesystems which were written for other OSes and ported to
Linux as not being derivative works in his mind.   In the end, it
comes down to what the copyright holder wants to assert and what the
courts finally decide.   As far as I know, no major kernel rights
holders have attempted to assert anything in this area; so the courts
have never had an opportunity to give us a definitive answer to this
question.

On a related note, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) announced
today that they will be handling GPL related issues for the Samba
project as well as as newly created project "GPL Compliance Project
for Linux Developers".

http://sfconservancy.org/news/2012/may/29/compliance/

They claim to have seven Linux kernel developers who have joined this
new Linux compliance project.   Five other well known free software
projects are also mentioned at the end of the announcement as having
asked the SFC to handle license compliance issues as they come up in
the future.   If enough Linux developers with code in core parts of
the kernel join this new compliance project then it is possible that
binary modules will start to disappear.

Bill Bogstad