Re: [PATCH] paravirt.h

Geert Uytterhoeven
2006-08-20T08:58:31Z

On Sat, 19 Aug 2006, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > These are Linux specific operations.
> >
> > Without an _GPL you are in the grey area where courts have to decide whether
> > a module using this would be a derived work according to copyright law in
> > $country_of_the_court and therefore has to be GPL.
> >
> > With the _GPL, everything is clear without any lawyers involved.
> >
>
> Hardly. The _GPL is a hint as to the intent of the author, but it is no more
> than a hint.
>
> My intent here (and I think the intent of the other authors) is not to cause
> breakage of things which currently work, so the _GPL is not appropriate for
> that reason. Paravirt_ops is a restatement of many interfaces which already
> exist in Linux in a non-_GPL form, so making the structure _GPL is effectively

My copy of linux-2.6.18-rc4/COPYING doesn't mention anything about these
`non-_GPL' interfaces. It does mention `normal system calls', but AFAIK symbols
exported to modules are not syscalls.

> relicensing them.

That's a pretty strong statement...

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds