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by jcelerier 2607 days ago
> which should be sufficient enough to comply with GPL

this is an age-old debate. Some people say that it is e.g. legal to make (redistribute to precise) a GPL device driver for windows, and some argue that it is not, because the whole kernel should then be GPL.

> https://linux.slashdot.org/story/02/11/05/0051225/gpl-issues...

2 comments

The Linux kernel will be isolated by an hypervisor.
But in Windows drivers are binary files which talk to the kernel through an API. Not much different than a binary user mode application. If binary user mode applications written in GPL are ok, then so should this.
> Not much different than a binary user mode application.

well, user-mode applications do syscalls to the kernel, not direct function calls.

But the actual syscall is made by a Windows user mode library - kernel32.dll/... So your GPL user mode app calls directly into proprietary Windows library.
That is specifically allowed by the GNU GPL. See "System Libraries" and adjacent paragraphs.
There is a mention of "System Libraries" in GPLv3, but not GPLv2, which the Linux kernel is licensed under.
There are similar provisions in GPLv2.