Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 9 Feb 2008 17:50:51 +0100 | From | Christer Weinigel <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] USB: mark USB drivers as being GPL only |
| |
On Sat, 9 Feb 2008 17:41:00 +0200 "Pekka Enberg" <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi> wrote:
> On Feb 9, 2008 5:13 PM, Christer Weinigel <christer@weinigel.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.
Ok good.
> 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.
So it magically becomes a derived work if I do a:
#define malloc(n) kmalloc(n, 0) #define pthread_mutex_lock(l) spin_lock(l)
at the beginning of the file? My guess is that it is much to trivial to be considered a creative expression and thus would not be covered by copyright. Meaning it would not be a derivative 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."
A device driver isn't that hard either. I can write a device driver with a hand tied behind my back, to write a good balancing tree, I'd have to spend a lot more time reading up on algorithms. So "trivial" is a matter of background.
And once again, I don't believe API copyrights are valid, because in that case Wine would have been sued out of the water a long time ago.
> Thanks for the straw man, though!
*sigh* Now you're just being insulting.
/Christer
| |