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But then you'll get sued for violating BitKeeper's EULA, see this reply of Larry McVoy.
McVoy seems to play this game even harder than Microsoft, seeing that Wine's been cloning Windows for about 10 years now.

A couple follow ups on the kernel mailing list:

A very interesting bit from the busybox maintainer, who has evidently already sent linksys two letters

A post outlinging the possibility that Belkin is also shipping GPL'd code

A few other people are throwing their two cents in, but those were the most interesting, code be an interesting test of corporate policey, and the ability of the GPL to withstand a court battle.

A couple follow ups on the kernel mailing list:

A very interesting bit from the busybox maintainer, who has evidently already sent linksys two letters

A post outlinging the possibility that Belkin is also shipping GPL'd code

A few other people are throwing their two cents in, but those were the most interesting, code be an interesting test of corporate policey, and the ability of the GPL to withstand a court battle.

(the same anon coward here, not that it really matters)

It appears that you are the one who can't read. It says "based on the following functions from the Linux kernel sources" and not "using GPL code from Linux". They had a look at the code in Linux to get ideas about how to implement PCI.

No. They duplicated Linux source. See Russell King's lkml post. I suppose I can't blame you for not having researched this in depth, but I think I can blame you for faulty reasoning. "Based on" could mean their source was based on the Linux source or, as you suggest, based on some of the ideas in the Linux source, but if so it would (almost certainly) not infringe the Linux authors' copyrights and so:

a) why would Linux hackers have complained?

b) how could they even know that Castle had done this? (in fact it first got noticed because the function names were there in the binary, and after Castle removed them it was still verifiable that object code produced from those functions was still in there)

c) why would Castle now be providing their source if they hadn't infringed the GPL?

In summary, please engage brain before posting. (ooh, I am enjoying this rude anonymous coward lark).

I still don't think we've got a conspiracy here.

From the press release:

For the avoidance of doubt, the hardware abstraction layer (roughly analogous to a PC's BIOS) has it's PCI allocation and bridge setup based in part on the following functions from the Linux kernel sources...

Any company or individual wishing to receive a copy of the source code to this component should apply in writing to:

The Managing Director
Castle Technology Ltd
Ore Trading Estate
Woodbridge Road
Framlingham
Suffolk
IP13 9LL

enclosing a formatted 3.5" floppy diskette and return postage stamps, or international reply coupons for those outside the United Kingdom.

Russell King has posted a followup to his LKML posting. Perhaps all is not as it seems.

The Linux Kernel Mailing List has a FAQ on such drivers (including NVIDIA). I think it's question #19 where you can access the actual posts.

http://www.fixwindows.com