From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261161AbTEFTdN (ORCPT ); Tue, 6 May 2003 15:33:13 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261247AbTEFTdN (ORCPT ); Tue, 6 May 2003 15:33:13 -0400 Received: from mail.webmaster.com ([216.152.64.131]:64910 "EHLO shell.webmaster.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261161AbTEFTdM (ORCPT ); Tue, 6 May 2003 15:33:12 -0400 From: "David Schwartz" To: "David S. Miller" , "Yoav Weiss" Cc: Subject: RE: The disappearing sys_call_table export. Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 12:45:40 -0700 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.6604 (9.0.2911.0) Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: <1052212504.983.16.camel@rth.ninka.net> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org > On Tue, 2003-05-06 at 01:45, Yoav Weiss wrote: > > In fact, in linux which is opensource, you can probably write a script > > that extracts any unexported symbol from the source code, find a path to > > it from some exported symbol, and automagically create a module that > > re-exports this symbol for your legacy driver to use. > You might have a derivative work after obtaining access to a > non-exported interface. If this is correct, binary-only modules > can't do this and therefore they must stick to exported interfaces. Obviously you don't have much experience getting around licenses. ;) You GPL the part that does the dirty work. Then your closed-source module only uses exported interfaces and the boundary between GPL and closed-source code is a clear license boundary. DS