Re: [PATCH] USB: mark USB drivers as being GPL only

Christer Weinigel
2008-02-09T16:51:26Z

On Sat, 9 Feb 2008 17:41:00 +0200
"Pekka Enberg" <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi> wrote:

> On Feb 9, 2008 5:13 PM, Christer Weinigel <christer@weinigel.se>
> wrote:
> > But lets say that the b-tree code uses Linux-only primitives such as
> > kmalloc or spinlocks, and that I wrote the code specifically for the
> > Linux kernel, does that make it into a derivative work?
> >
> > What if I do a trivial replace of the kmalloc calls with malloc and
> > the spinlock calls with pthread locks instead, has my code been
> > forever tainted by being written for Linux so that I can't do that
> > anymore? What if I go the other way and write my code using the
> > posix functions to begin with and do the equally trivial replace of
> > malloc with kmalloc?
>
> As the copyright owner, you're free to distribute the original parts
> as you wish as long as it doesn't contain anything that is derived
> work.

Ok good.

> So, when you remove those kmalloc/spin_lock calls, you're
> _obviously not_ tainted. But that doesn't mean you're free to
> distribute it when it _does_ contain derived work.

So it magically becomes a derived work if I do a:

#define malloc(n) kmalloc(n, 0)
#define pthread_mutex_lock(l) spin_lock(l)

at the beginning of the file? My guess is that it is much to trivial
to be considered a creative expression and thus would not be covered by
copyright. Meaning it would not be a derivative work.

> Besides, a device
> driver can't even be compared to something as trivial as b-tree
> implementation that uses kmalloc/spin_lock in terms of "is it derived
> work or not."

A device driver isn't that hard either. I can write a device driver
with a hand tied behind my back, to write a good balancing tree, I'd
have to spend a lot more time reading up on algorithms. So "trivial" is
a matter of background.

And once again, I don't believe API copyrights are valid, because in
that case Wine would have been sued out of the water a long time ago.

> Thanks for the straw man, though!

*sigh* Now you're just being insulting.

/Christer