Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe

[Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org>]

Kalle Kivimaa writes:

> Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> > My recollection is that there is no specific exemption - rather, Linus
> > has said that he believes the syscall layer to be the boundary of
> > derived works.
> 
> The COPYING starts with this:
> 
> 'NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel
>  services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use
>  of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".'
> 
> Whether you call it an exemption or not is semantics, but it is a
> clear statement from the copyright holder what he wants the license to
> cover.

That is clear about *a* copyright holder.  It is not necessarily true
about all of them.  There have been times where Linus's interpretation
was not shared by all: Linus has said he has no objection to
distributing binary firmware blobs in aggregation with the kernel, but
others who contribute to the kernel objected to that practice.

Michael Poole