Ubuntu reaches out to embarrassed SuSE devs

[James Wilkinson]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> I thought you were suggesting that people had a choice
> of license terms when submitting changes.  The terms make
> it very clear that they don't.

Actually, I understand that there are parts of the kernel (usually
drivers) that are available under both the GPL and the new BSD license.
This usually happens when someone wants support for a particular bit of
hardware in Linux and in the BSD kernels, and is prepared to write *a*
driver. He could then submit it to both communities under the appropriate
license for each community, but that would mean that he couldn't easily
take fixes from the Linux version of the driver and put it into the BSD
one. So the dual-license is the normal answer.

This *is* generally considered to be permissible under copyright law,
since it's the copyright owner who is giving extra permissions to use his
"intellectual property", and once a driver has been ported to BSD, that
port is no longer considered to be derivative of Linux. (Of course, the
author can't take any GPL-only code or headers with him.) It's the same
argument that allowed IBM to take code from Dynix/ptx (which they own)
and put it into Linux -- once it's been ported to Linux, it's no longer a
derivative of System V.

It would be possible for a later maintainer to decide she didn't want to
support the BSD version and remove the BSD license. Future versions (but
not previous versions) of the Linux driver would then be GPL only. This
rarely happens.

See, for example:
http://lwn.net/Articles/169825/
http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/kernel-mentors/2005-July/000344.html

This also means that there are parts of the Linux kernel which Microsoft
*could* legally port to Windows.

James.

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