RE: [future of drivers?] a proposal for binary drivers.

Bernd Petrovitsch
2006-03-13T23:09:44Z

On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 14:15 -0500, Lee Revell wrote:
[...]
> No I was referring to the implication that the GPL is not enforceable
> under US copyright law.

Sorry, but where and how did I my sentences implies that?

The email spoke about "libraries" and "applications" which have under
the GPL also legal semantics (especially if you use both in the same
sentence) which IMHO do not apply to "kernel and drivers". Or the
original author sees the core kernel as a "library" and his driver as an
"application" (which is IMHO in the sense of th reasoning if I read the
analogy correct).

And the whole chain of reasoning lacks IMHO important conditions like
under which rules you actually acquired the rights to the source you
*based your work on*. If your work is not based on that GPL source, it
is a completely other thing (and discussion).

So at most I killed the prove/reasoning as such. But this doesn't imply
that it's result is wrong (as there may be another one).

If the GPL would not be enforcable under US law (which is AFAIK not the
case), the GPL would be probably dead anyway since it was written in the
US by US people with the US jurisdiction in mind AFAIK.

You should hear Austrian lawyers speaking about their problems with "the
GPL and Austrian law" (or German law - if Austria is too small to be
relevant - which is not that different in many aspects).
Yes, it got better in the last year.

Bernd
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