From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753234AbYI1Tpt (ORCPT ); Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:45:49 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1752466AbYI1Tpk (ORCPT ); Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:45:40 -0400 Received: from www.church-of-our-saviour.org ([69.25.196.31]:47597 "EHLO thunker.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751896AbYI1Tpj (ORCPT ); Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:45:39 -0400 Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:45:36 -0400 From: Theodore Tso To: jmerkey@wolfmountaingroup.com Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [REQUEST] Clarification from Copyright Holders on FUSE/NDISWRAPPER Message-ID: <20080928194536.GC8711@mit.edu> Mail-Followup-To: Theodore Tso , jmerkey@wolfmountaingroup.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <33521.166.70.238.43.1222622153.squirrel@webmail.wolfmountaingroup.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <33521.166.70.238.43.1222622153.squirrel@webmail.wolfmountaingroup.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.17+20080114 (2008-01-14) X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: tytso@mit.edu X-SA-Exim-Scanned: No (on thunker.thunk.org); SAEximRunCond expanded to false Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 11:15:53AM -0600, jmerkey@wolfmountaingroup.com wrote: > I have been involved in numerous discussions with a variety of folks, > including Bruce Perens regarding the new policy governing kernel drivers > created for specific hardware/features and the Linux Foundations position > on proprietary hardware drives. The position statement on closed-source Linux Kernel Modules was deliberately not a "policy statement", nor did it talk about issues about what is or isn't legal. This was deliberate. Issues over whether or not the GPL covers binary modules fundamentally depend on individual legal jourisdictions' interpretations of copyright law and derivitive works, and that was something which the kernel developers who worked on the language of said joint position statement deliberately stayed away from that question. > The consensus opinion from Bruce and others seems to be that applications > that use normal system services on Linux do not appear to be involved in > GPL related issues. If you need legal advice, you need to pay a lawyer to apply the facts of the your particular situation to the law, in a particular legal jourisdiction, and then give you official legal advice. Opinions by kernel developers aren't particularly useful here, and is off-topic for this mailing list. The intent of the copyright owners is fairly clear; most of the kernel (exceptions are noted on a handful of source fils) is to be licensed under the terms of the GNU Public License, version 2. There is another long-standing assertion by Linus in the COPYING file: NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work". Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it. Given that FUSE drivers communicate to the kernel via /dev/fuse and normal system calls, you can draw your own conclusions. (However, most FUSE userspace drivers do utilize libfuse, which available under an LGPLv2 license. If you are using Windows-based source code, and linking it against an LGPLv2 license, there may be issues there as well.) All of this is not legal advice, however; if you want real legal advise, you need to ask a lawyer, not the FSF, and not LKML. - Ted