{"id":47,"date":"2006-12-06T03:07:25","date_gmt":"2006-12-06T10:07:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/albertomilone.com\/wordpress\/?p=47"},"modified":"2006-12-06T03:07:25","modified_gmt":"2006-12-06T10:07:25","slug":"to-the-ones-who-accuse-me-or-nvidia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/albertomilone.com\/blog\/to-the-ones-who-accuse-me-or-nvidia\/","title":{"rendered":"To the ones who accuse me or Nvidia"},"content":{"rendered":"

To the ones who accuse me or Nvidia (which is not related to me in any way<\/strong>) of infringing the GPL or of anything else, I would like to point out that:<\/p>\n

1)<\/strong> I DO NOT promote the Nvidia driver in any way. If you use the proprietary driver it’s only YOUR choice.<\/p>\n

2)<\/strong> Both Envy and my repositories are meant to help<\/strong> those users who would use the proprietary driver even if I had never been born.<\/p>\n

3)<\/strong> I receive many emails and posts in the (Italian and English) forums in which users ask me to keep both Envy and my repositories up-to-date every time Nvidia releases a new driver.<\/p>\n

4)<\/strong> I don’t want to start a flamewar (actually I don’t want to start a discussion at all). You’re free to think what you like. Just DO NOT post on my blog to tell me what is moral or not. If you do, I will delete your posts.<\/p>\n

5)<\/strong> Please, do not claim (at least not on my blog<\/strong>) that the Nvidia driver violates the GPL since Linus Torvalds himself is not sure about it. Here is Torvalds’ opinion:<\/p>\n

The kernel _is_ GPL. No ifs, buts and maybe’s about it. As a result, anything that is a derived work has to be GPL’d. It’s that simple.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Now, the “derived work” issue in copyright law is the only thing that leads to any gray areas. There are areas that are not gray at all: user space is clearly not a derived work, while kernel patches clearly _are_ derived works.<\/p>\n

But one gray area in particular is something like a driver that was originally written for another operating system (ie clearly not a derived work of Linux in origin). At exactly what point does it become a derived work of the kernel (and thus fall under the GPL)?<\/p>\n

THAT is a gray area, and _that_ is the area where I personally believe that some modules may be considered to not be derived works simply because they weren’t designed for Linux and don’t depend on any special Linux behaviour.<\/p>\n

Basically:
\n– anything that was written with Linux in mind (whether it then _also_ works on other operating systems or not) is clearly partially a derived work.
\n– anything that has knowledge of and plays with fundamental internal Linux behaviour is clearly a derived work. If you need to muck around with core code, you’re derived, no question about it.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

So being a module is not a sign of not being a derived work. It’s just one sign that _maybe_ it might have other arguments for why it isn’t derived.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

[… T]hese days it would be hard to argue that a new driver or filesystem was developed without any thought of Linux. I think the NVidia people can probably reasonably honestly say that the code they ported had _no_ Linux origin. But quite frankly, I’d be less inclined to believe that for some other projects out there..<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here is the link to the discussion<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To the ones who accuse me or Nvidia (which is not related to me in any way) of infringing the GPL or of anything else, I would like to point out that: 1) I DO NOT promote the Nvidia driver in any way. If you use the proprietary driver it’s only YOUR choice. 2) Both […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ubuntu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/albertomilone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/albertomilone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/albertomilone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/albertomilone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/albertomilone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/albertomilone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/albertomilone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/albertomilone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/albertomilone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}