Re: Developing non-commercial drivers ?

From: Chris Friesen
Date: Tue Nov 18 2008 - 13:14:19 EST


Radhakrishnan wrote:

Am I therefore right in assuming that this is a specific case where the
open source nature of Linux is being used with great effect but the very
nature of the licensing denies ANYONE ELSE from being a party to this
transaction ?

Actually, I think the GPL is still satisfied. There's nothing that says that changes need to be passed upstream, only downstream.

1) Presumably you won't be distributing the binary drivers to anyone else, and you gave Organization A the code, so the license is satisfied.

2) Organization A has no other customers, so is not going to be distributing the binaries to anyone else.

3) The end-user (the Navy) was provided the source code for the GPL'd software that they purchased.

As far as I can tell, this is all fully GPL-compliant.

Chris
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/