The ability to make a transient copy of a work in order to use it should not be considered in regards to copyright law. It has always been implied that you have the right to make such copies. For example, when you read a book, light creates a copy of the work on your retina, and that's how we perceive it. These copies have never been considered for the purpose of copyright, and neither has the copies floating around in peoples brains.

Exactly, this is their real motivation. They want the drivers in the tree because they care more about getting people who want to run linux to run it under their new windows VM than trying to kill linux, which I assume they've given up on.

I've looked around and all I see is casual mentions of static linking, which I assume to mean static linking to the kernel. I would like to be enlightened if I am wrong.

I find it very hard to believe that Microsoft would copy/paste GPL code or that they would statically link to some random library, especially considering that kernel drivers usually statically link against nothing but the kernel.

Which, as I have said, has been said by Linus Torvalds himself not to be a violation.

I haven't read anywhere that GPL code was found in their drivers. I would like to read more about that, can you provide a link?

The software freedom law center makes it's living by taking companys to court over GPL violations. At best anything it says must be taken with a grain of salt. The fact is, no amount of gyration or hand waving can magically make Microsoft code belong to the community. Microsoft wrote those drivers from scratch, and therefore can license them however it wants. Period. They are not required to use the GPL unless they incorporate GPL code into the drivers, which they did not.

Some people like to say that if you link your code with GPL code than your code must be GPL. It doesn't even say this in the GPL though some say it is implied. It's an untested legal theory. It's never even been brought to court and it has a very good chance of loosing because the court is likely to take a very dim view of the idea that one person magically owns another persons work. In the normal case, however, it might fly... That is of using a GPL library in a non-GPL program or linking a non-GPL library into a GPL program. This might be seen by the judge as taking advantage of something not yours, but in the case of loading drivers into the Kernel where there is longstanding acceptance of proprietary drivers it would fail, and this precedent would put even the widely accepted case in jeopardy.

But more importantly, Linus Torvalds himself does not believe the act of simply loading a proprietary driver module in a running kernel is a GPL violation, and he has explicitly stated this in the past, which means a lawsuit over this "violation" would be impossible to win, and even impossible to bring, considering Linus would not sign off on it. In addition, this is hardly the first proprietary software driver for Linux. There have been many over the years. Many of the wifi cards that have vender supplied Linux drivers, for example, use proprietary drivers because of an FCC mandate that the wireless products are not end-user modifiable.

A lot of people like to believe copyright is cut and dry. It's not. Let me assure you that the copyright act, written for books, says nothing about weather linking against another work makes your work a derivative work, which makes it a judgement call, and this issue has never been brought before a judge. When it is, you better hope it's over a better case than this, because if it was brought under this case it would have a very, very, good chance of loosing.

In my linux product which runs off compaq flash I can tell you that:

You often see lots of garbage and complaining in dmesg.

The flash chip fails to overwrite files properly. So that when I overwrite the file and try and read it back I get garbage.

Often the flash chip seems to have successfully overwritten the files and you don't realize anything is wrong until you reboot.

And... They don't last anything like the number of writes they pretend to. If you put even a light write load on a flash chip for any extended duration (Few days, few weeks) it will blow up.

David

God, I'm tired of it being repeated that IPV4 addresses are running out. Everybody who's not a journalist should know that it's not true.

There's no reason every person on earth needs an IP. Nat+uPNP is perfectly capable and 100% backwords compatible.

That's not even getting into all the millions of unused IP's being held by the early internet companies.

IP's just need to be charged for on a early basis. Start with $1 per year per ip to EVERYONE who owns an IP's and you'll see the "IP Shortage" vanish overnight.