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:Great!

[Dalcius]

Cue 10,001 Slashdot folks ANL posts... :)

Related question.

[mary_will_grow]

Weird, I came to slashdot.org with the intention of posting a Very similar question.
I recently downloaded the Apple developer kit, and basically signed away any right to disclose what the hell is available on their developer site. They use this "IOKit" for writing device drivers, but I want to write an open source device driver for Serial-to-USB converters (the iBook unfortunately has no serial or parallel port!!) So does anyone know of any resources where I can learn how to write a device driver for OS-X without using the closed-source developer kits Apple provides?

Re:OT: Law School for Geeks?

[RAMMS EIN]

``a history major knows what software is and may even know what a divise drive is''
Whew...those history majors must be really smart... I even don't know what a divise drive is... Or maybe it is actually divide drive?

Divide Drive, n: The drive to divide the opposition, in order to better be able to help them. Historically, this has been attributed to the Red Army in the Russian Revolution. See also Russian Revolution.