Comment by mbrumlow
7 years ago
Man, I thought the exact same thing. I must have stolen it from you. Sorry!
In all seriousness is this normal? I write and work on kernel drivers for the company I work for and have always gone out of my way to not view or interact with any code that remotely relates to the work I do (out side of what I coded). Our competitor even released their version of a block device snapshot driver and while I would be tempted to see how they did things I have avoided it every step of the way.
So, if a Microsoft kernel developer doesn't follow the practice of not reading kernel code with an incompatible license, does that mean we can assume they don't follow it generally? Can we assume they take code from the Linux kernel, violating the GPL?
Possible.
Doesn't GPL actually offer a person a freedom to study the code? Isn't it a common phenomena of rewriting GPL Linux Driver into BSD Licensed driver which will be put into mainline *BSD?
I know the case of OpenBSD 'stealing' GPL code from broadcom linux driver, but it was done by a naive kernel developer who copy-pasted the code and the maintainer who didn't bother to check the authenticity of the code. But AFAIK no GPL driver writer has a problem with the driver being rewritten into BSD licence.
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