Um... it's been common knowledge for years that the legal status of-
non-GPL kernel modules is an open issue. Specifically, whether a
device driver written for the Linux kernel is a derived work of the
kernel. Sounds like you didn't do your homework 3 years ago.
Why did you assume that linking a non-GPL module into the GPL Linux
kernel was legal? You have read the GPL right?
Lee
On 2/15/07, v j <vj.linux@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> This is in reference to the following thread:
>
> http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/12/14/63
>
> I am not sure if this is ever addressed in LKML, but linux is _very_
> popular in the embedded space. We (an embedded vendor) chose Linux 3
> years back because of its lack of royalty model, robustness and
> availability of infinite number of open-source tools.
>
> We recently decided to move to Linux 2.6 for our next product, mainly
> because Linux has worked so well for us in the past, and we would like
> to move up to keep up with the latest and greatest.
>
> However in moving to 2.6, we noticed a number of alarming things.
> Porting drivers over from devfs to udev, though easy raised a number
> of alarming issues. Driver's no longer could dynamically allocate
> their MAJOR/MINOR numbers. Doing so would mean they would have to use
> sysfs. However it seems that sysfs (and the class_ interface) is only
> available to GPL modules. This is very concerning. The drivers which
> we have written over the last three years are suddenly under threat.
> We don't mind statically assigning MAJOR/MINOR numbers to our drivers.
> We can do this and modify our user space applications too.
>
> However we have a worrying trend here. If at some point it becomes
> illegal to load our modules into the linux kernel, then it is
> unacceptable to us. We would have been better off choosing VxWorks or
> OSE 3 years ago when we made an OS choice. The fact that Linux is
> becoming more and more closed is very very alarming.
>
> vj.
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