[olug] OT: more Hans goodness

[Bill Brush]

I think you're on shaky legal ground equating "derivative" and
"written to work with."

You'd have to have access to the source code of the driver to show
that it's "derivative" of any OSS and the bar for declaring that
something is derived from something else is fairly high.  Since the
source code isn't available someone would have to sue the provider of
said drivers to obtain it.  As we saw with the SCO case, proving
infringement, and actually doing something about it is very difficult
and expensive.

For myself, I honestly don't particularly care about the "Free"
software crusade.  I guess that makes me part of the problem.  I do
care about being able to use my computer without some
too-smart-for-my-good piece of software interfering with me which is
one of the reasons I've been running SuSe for the last 3-4 years.

I don't see FOSS ever completely displacing closed-source software,
nor do I see closed-source software regaining it's monopoly.  Things
will settle somewhere in the middle where things work "good enough."



On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 2:27 PM, Luke -Jr <luke at dashjr.org> wrote:
> They are illegal. The company isn't under an obligation to provide a driver,
> but if they derive from Linux in order to do so, they are indeed obliged to
> adhere to the copyright terms like everyone else. In the case of Linux, there
> is an exception for userland linking (eg, via syscalls), but there is no
> driver API (this is why external modules break often) let alone one with a
> GPL exception.