Re: blatant GPL violation of ext2 and reiserfs filesystem drivers

Bryan Henderson
2005-12-22T21:46:13Z

>I'm not sure this is the case here or not,

No, the case here is much, much cleaner: Someone takes some code that
isn't licensed to him any other way than the public GPL license and
redistributes it slightly modified (ported) in object code form and won't
supply the source code.

>If one were to have an operating system, and set
>up a layer that simulated the API of Linux, such that Linux binary
>modules could be loaded, is _that_ a violation of the GPL? IOW, one
>would only distribute to you a system that has no GPL code,

You need a copyright license to copy (and to do some similar activities
mentioned in copyright law). In this scenario, you aren't copying
anything to which you don't own the copyright, so you simply don't need a
copyright license of any kind. Whether you violate the conditions of the
GPL, thus meaning you don't have a license to copy, is irrelevant.