Bug#815060: citation needed?

[Ben Hutchings]

On Thu, 18 Feb 2016 22:41:02 +0100 Holger Levsen <holger at layer-acht.org> wrote:
> control: tags -1 + moreinfo
> 
> Hi Julian,
> 
> could you please cite those "lawyers and people" or explain their arguments? 
> (Not that citing a lawyer neccessarily means anything, but just stating some 
> lawyers think something is not even enough to think about removing a package 
> from the archive.)
> 
> And the ZFS situation is not comparable because that one is about a 
> incompatability of two different licences…

It is very much comparable.  The CDDL is a free software licence but it
has different requirements from the GPL and doesn't allow relicensing
to follow the GPL's copyleft provision, so you can't distribute a work
derived from two works under the two licences.  Similarly, the Nvidia
licence says we have no right to source code for, or even the right to
attempt to decompile, the binary blob they provide, and doesn't allow
relicensing either the blob or provided source code to follow the GPL's
copyleft provision.  Once they are combined with a GPL'd work, the
combination is not legally distributable.

As for the idea that the nvidia kernel driver is an independent work:
the part provided as source code uses Linux specific kernel APIs such
as procfs, CPU hotplug notifiers and seq_file, and provides wrappers
for the console_lock and console_unlock functions that can then be
called by the blob.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.
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