Ubuntu reaches out to embarrassed SuSE devs

[Ian Malone]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-11-25 at 18:29, Craig White wrote:
>>>>>> who struck a deal with Microsoft which is borderline on the GPL.
>>>>> Isn't 'illegal to distribute' something that is decided by
>>>>> the copyright/patent owner, not some slightly interested
>>>>> bystanders? 
>>>> For the kernel I *am* a copyright holder. 
>>> And how is what you are doing any different than Ballmer's
>>> claims that the kernel infringes on Microsoft's patents?
>> ----
>> Do you actually expect Alan to defend the GPL license? He didn't choose
>> to use the GPL license, Linus did. Perhaps you need to debate Linus
>> about his choice. Alan is contributing code to the kernel, at this point
>> as I understand it, because he is employed by Red Hat.
> 
> Not the license - the implication that binary driver modules are
> an illegal derived worked based on the kernel's copyrighted code.
> Until someone proves this unlikely claim in court it is as much
> FUD as Ballmer blustering about patents, and serves no one's purpose.
> 
I don't know about whether it's been tested, but the license
could of course prohibit distribution alongside other packages
(as Sun's Java did until recently, and as GPL3 attempts to do
with patented material).  They can certainly say you can't
use it with x[1] (especially as the GPL has almost no requirements
on end users as opposed to developers).  The derivation of
the modules themselves doesn't have much to do with it, and
while copyright really should apply to creative works (i.e. the
code you wrote which is used to create the module), developers
have never really helped by (seemingly intentionally) confusing
binary generation with program writing.

[1] Was originally upper-case, but I don't mean X.

-- 
imalone