Question about licensing of kmods

[Orcan Ogetbil]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 1:55 PM, Till Maas wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 03, 2009 at 11:51:15PM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> Till Maas wrote:
>> > If this is a problem, then it cannot go into any RPMFusion repository,
>> > because packages in RPMFusion still need to be legally distributable,
>> > even if they are in the nonfree repository.
>>
>> All GPL-incompatible kmods are illegal, yet RPM Fusion still ships them.
>>
>> So, as kmod-nvidia and others are allowed, I don't see why this one wouldn't
>> be allowed as well.
>
> Is it an official RPMFusion opinion, that these kmods are illegal?
> Because then these FAQ entry needs to be adjusted:
>
> http://rpmfusion.org/FAQ#head-3c87307eb360d4f17920dcf064039366de8f58df
>

No it is only personal opinion. There is an ongoing debate about this
and this is certainly a grey area. It depends on how a particular
country's copyright law defines the concept "derived work". If the
country considers closed source kernel modules as derivatives of the
Linux kernel, then yes, it is a violation of GPL. However many,
including Linus, think that it is hard to consider these drivers as
derivative work. Since there is no court case example ruling in either
way, we can't really be 100% sure, either way. For instance, NVidia is
a big company. We are sure that they got some legal advise before
releasing binary drivers.

Orcan