Kernel source

[Arjan van de Ven]

On Tue, 2006-04-11 at 07:14 -0500, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> Arjan van de Ven wrote: 
> > On Sun, 2006-04-09 at 14:31 -0700, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> >   
> > > Arjan van de Ven <arjan at fenrus.demon.nl> wrote:
> > >     
> > > > I'm surprised... I thought fedora already came with the best driver
> > > > for that hardware built in...
> > > >       
> > > Not every MAC+PHY combination is supported for the GPL NIC driver
> > > (forcedeth) in the stock kernel or via patches to the kernel (addec
> > > by Red Hat).  So sometimes you want to load the nVidia NIC driver
> > > (nvnet) in the meantime until the GPL NIC driver (forcedeth) catches
> > > up.
> > >     
> > 
> > this is one of the reason such (illegal) binary modules are bad. People
> > don't report or work with the open driver to get that one fixed, but
> > rather just jump to the binary junk. But that way linux as a whole
> > doesn't make progress and it doesn't get fixed for the future, giving
> > again a crappy experience in the next release.
> > 
> >   
> 
> What is 'illegal' about binary apps/drivers/modules/etc ?

there is nothing illegal about binary applications.

However binary kernel modules link to the kernel and are a derived work
of the kernel (for many reasons) and thus need to be GPL licensed (as
per the GPL license). For example, basically every binary module
contains code taken from the GPL kernel.