Slashdot has news and comments on the current Kororaa LiveCD issues. The Kororaa project received an email stating they were in violation of the GPL by distributing their XGL LiveCD with NVIDIA and ATI binary drivers. Unfortunately, XGL does not work without these drivers, making the distributing of the CD without them pointless. I hope this is cleaned up, because they are not the only LiveCD distributing binary graphics drivers.
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Here is some more info on the Kororaa (Nvidia/ATI kernel module) controversy:
Quote taken from: http://linux.coconia.net/politics/kmodsGPL.htm
The above mentioned possibility of hiding the entire code of a program as an application library, is the reason that the GPL demands that any application that links to GPL’d shared libraries, must itself be GPL’d (a program is GPL’d, if it is licensed under the GPL).
It has been claimed that distributing a GPL’d kernel with binary closed source kernel modules is illegal. This claim has been advanced, to stop Linux distributors from shipping with Nvidia and ATI drivers that work “straight out of the box”. A recent example of this is the Kororaa controversy.
Those wishing to cripple Linux, make many unsubstantiated claims, some of which are wrong, in order to prevent Linux distributors shipping Nvidia and ATI drivers that work “out of the box”. Here is a sample:
1) GPL and non-GPL components cannot be included together on a CD.
2) Closed source kernel modules distributed with a GPL’d kernel clearly violates the GPL.
3) Don’t include closed source kernel modules as the situation is murky. You might get sued.
4) Closed source kernel modules link to the kernel in the same way that applications link to libraries, therefore you cannot include them with a GPL’d kernel.
One, is wrong. Two, is not clear at all. Three, which sounds correct, is also wrong. Think about it, who is going to sue you? The Free Software Foundation? Not likely. Perhaps Microsoft might be interested in enforcing the GPL. Four, seems to have some merit, but is wrong……….
For the full article, see http://linux.coconia.net/