Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Allen Benn who wrote (9714)	5/25/2001 2:47:17 PM
From: Bill Fischofer	Respond to of 10309

Being an ex-IBMer, I know all about FUD. :) However, it's really a non-issue here. As long as the hooks are plausibly presented as a set of API extensions to the kernel (and subject to GPL) I can't see any court ruling that applications which make use of these APIs are any more likely to run afoul of GPL than those which use any other documented API. Of course, not everything can be done cleanly with hooks. A particular embedded application may wish to replace the Linux process scheduler wholesale with its own algorithms to achieve its realtime tolerance goals. Here GPL becomes problematic and I've no doubt BSD would provide a more attractive scaffold for this sort of surgery. But even here if a company were sufficiently motivated it could divide its application into a realtime scheduler which it could generalize and then 'donate' to the GPL and then make use of it for its own purposes. That's the whole idea of the GPL--to encourage the general improvement of the code base so that all can benefit from its increased capabilities.