linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] USB: mark USB drivers as being GPL only

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Message-ID: <84144f020802090741k6fe3324cu99d70f13d9fd54ec@mail.gmail.com>
Date:	Sat, 9 Feb 2008 17:41:00 +0200
From:	"Pekka Enberg" <penberg@...helsinki.fi>
To:	"Christer Weinigel" <christer@...nigel.se>
Cc:	"Hans-Jürgen Koch" <hjk@...utronix.de>,
	"David Newall" <davidn@...idnewall.com>,
	"Marcel Holtmann" <marcel@...tmann.org>,
	"Diego Zuccato" <diego@...llo.alma.unibo.it>,
	"Greg KH" <greg@...ah.com>, linux-usb@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] USB: mark USB drivers as being GPL only

On Feb 9, 2008 5:13 PM, Christer Weinigel <christer@...nigel.se> wrote:
> But lets say that the b-tree code uses Linux-only primitives such as
> kmalloc or spinlocks, and that I wrote the code specifically for the
> Linux kernel, does that make it into a derivative work?
>
> What if I do a trivial replace of the kmalloc calls with malloc and the
> spinlock calls with pthread locks instead, has my code been forever
> tainted by being written for Linux so that I can't do that anymore?
> What if I go the other way and write my code using the posix functions
> to begin with and do the equally trivial replace of malloc with
> kmalloc?

As the copyright owner, you're free to distribute the original parts
as you wish as long as it doesn't contain anything that is derived
work. So, when you remove those kmalloc/spin_lock calls, you're
_obviously not_ tainted. But that doesn't mean you're free to
distribute it when it _does_ contain derived work. Besides, a device
driver can't even be compared to something as trivial as b-tree
implementation that uses kmalloc/spin_lock in terms of "is it derived
work or not."

Thanks for the straw man, though!
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