"Licensed" codecs

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Sep 23, 2003, Pavel Rosenboim <pavelr at coresma.com> wrote:

> Well, NVIDIA distributes its modules without sources, and so do other
> companies.

Which means they may just have chosen to take the risk and bet that
the copyright holders of Linux (the kernel) won't all get together and
sue them for infringement.

Or they believe their proprietary module to not be a derivative,
because it wasn't written specifically for Linux, and that only the
glue code, for which they provide sources, is a derivative, so only
that would be subject to the GNU GPL.

There are several possibilities on the table.  Theories abound.  The
truth, only their lawyers know.

#include <std/disclaimer/IANAL>

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                 aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer