GPL Issues Surrounding Commercial Device Drivers?

Demiurg asks: "My company has recently decided to support Linux for it's embedded networking products which means that I'm starting to write Linux device drivers for our hardware. The company was very concerned about GPL issues and consulted a lawyer - who advised us to go for a user-space driver, saying that this is the only safe way to avoid GPL issues. I tried to give them a few examples of companies distributing binary only drivers (NVIDIA and Rational) but was told that these companies do not distribute binary only drivers - they only allow you to download them from a web site (which is not an option for an embedded product). What does Slashdot have to say about the issue? Is writing a user-mode (and hence not very efficient) driver the only way for a company to protect it's intellectual property? Please refrain from giving answers like 'all code should be GPL' - although I personally may agree, such answers will not help me convince management to make the change." Are there any lawyers (or readers with the right legal knowledge) out there that can confirm or contradict this recommendation?

Comments

Re:lawyers

[God! Awful]

I'm getting very tired of this mistake. It's being pushed by MS, but it was started by the likes of Slashdotters who don't understand the terminology. The GPL is not viral, copyright law is.

Dude, you are completely full of shit. Copyright law is a little bit viral, but the GPL is ebola viral. The major difference is that if you include a copyrighted image/paragraph/etc in your original work (whether by permission or via fair use) the copyright on the cited work does not infect the remaining 90% of your original work. How can you gloss over a detail like that. It makes ALL the difference.

However, like all copyrighted works, GPLed software cannot be modified and "made your own". A modified (or "derived") work is just that.

Get a sense of proportion. There is a huge difference between someone who wants to take a GPL'ed app, tweak it a bit, and sell it under a non-GPL license, and someone who wants to take a GPL'ed library and include it as a small part of a non-GPL'ed program. That would be stretching the definition of "derivative work" beyond the level of common sense.

However, to say that it's the GPL that's viral is silly. Try cutting up a magazine, reassembling the articles and then publishing the result.

Again, you're full of shit. Each of the excerpts is covered by its own copyright; they aren't infecting each other. If you take some excerpts from Tom Clancy and mix them in with some quotes from Charles Dickens, it doesn't mean that Tom Clancy gets copyright over the Dickens quotes, nor does the public domain status of the Dickens quotes cause the Clancy quotes to fall into the public domain. *THAT* would be viral licensing, and that's what the GPL does.

So maybe you ought to think about this issue a little more before you post this tripe again.

-a