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How to Avoid GPL Issue

DISCUSSION Dan Kegel 1 participant 1 message Jun 29, 2003

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Dan Kegel

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Quoted 1 line · GC

We are trying to port a third party hardware driver into Linux kernel and this third party vendor does not allow us to publish the source code. Is there any approach that we can avoid publicizing the third party code while porting to Linux? Do we need to write some shim layer code in Linux kernel to interface the third party code? How can we do that? Is there any document or samples?

Xose replied:

Quoted 2 lines

You should begin reading 'Proprietary kernel modules' at
http://people.redhat.com/rkeech/pkm.html

That's a very good summary. Xose pointed you to the right place, GC.

Practically speaking, you can probably do what Nvidia does, but nobody on this list will support users who run into trouble loading your kernel module.

In other words, you may not in fact be able to avoid the GPL issue... sorry...
- Dan

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Dan Kegel
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