From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <4035077E.5020506@am.sony.com> Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 10:59:10 -0800 From: Tim Bird MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: Non-GPL export of invalidate_mmap_range References: <20040217124001.GA1267@us.ibm.com> <20040217161929.7e6b2a61.akpm@osdl.org> <1077108694.4479.4.camel@laptop.fenrus.com> <20040218140021.GB1269@us.ibm.com> <20040218211035.A13866@infradead.org> <20040218150607.GE1269@us.ibm.com> <20040218222138.A14585@infradead.org> <20040218145132.460214b5.akpm@osdl.org> <20040218230055.A14889@infradead.org> <20040218162858.2a230401.akpm@osdl.org> <20040219123110.A22406@infradead.org> In-Reply-To: <20040219123110.A22406@infradead.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Christoph Hellwig Cc: Andrew Morton , torvalds@osd.org, paulmck@us.ibm.com, arjanv@redhat.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 04:28:58PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote: >>OK, so I looked at the wrapper. It wasn't a tremendously pleasant >>experience. It is huge, and uses fairly standard-looking filesytem >>interfaces and locking primitives. Also some awareness of NFSV4 for some >>reason. >> >>Still, the wrapper is GPL so this is not relevant. > > Well, something that needs an almost one megabyte big wrapper per defintion > is not a standalone work but something that's deeply interwinded with > the kernel. The tons of kernel version checks certainly show it's poking > deeper than it should. >... > > Something that pokes deep into internal structures and even > needs new exports certainly is a derived work. I'd argue (again) that having a complex glue layer is not evidence per se of the glued module being a derived work. If anything, it is evidence to the contrary. But it depends on the circumstances. The question for GPFS itself is whether it was modified to run with Linux, and how it was modified, and how much it was modified. If your argument is that Linux, after being modified with the glue layer, is now a derivative work of the glued module, that seems more likely. I'm not sure how the GPL reads on that case. ============================= Tim Bird Architecture Group Co-Chair CE Linux Forum Senior Staff Engineer Sony Electronics E-mail: Tim.Bird@am.sony.com ============================= -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: aart@kvack.org