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

Pekka Enberg
2008-02-09T17:29:48Z

On Feb 9, 2008 6:50 PM, Christer Weinigel <christer@weinigel.se> wrote:
> 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.

It doesn't matter how "hard" it was to write that code. What matters
is whether your code requires enough copyrighted aspects of the
original work to constitute as derived work. There's a huge difference
between using kmalloc and spin_lock and writing a driver that is built
on to of the full USB stack of Linux kernel, for example.