Propietary modules within GPL and BSD kernels

Posted by Francisco Garcia on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Francisco Garcia
Published on 2010-04-27T12:53:54Z Indexed on 2010/04/28 0:53 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 369

Filed under:

licensing

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kernel

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driver

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gpl

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bsd

Since the Linux kernel is GPL and not LGPL I suppose that it is illegal to link proprietary code to it. How does the industry circumvents this? I would expect that the GPL license will force any developer to release under GPL driver and/or kernel module.

Maybe I am confused and implementing a new module is not really linking against the kernel code ??? How do companies deal with this? Maybe linking the other way around (from kernel to their binaries)?

On the other hand there is the BSD kernel. Where you are free to link protected IP. Can you get a better design implementing your drivers within a BSD kernel? Is there any design restriction when implementing drivers for GPL kernels?

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