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Your code is no longer completely FOSS when you do that. It depends on a binary blob that you can't see into.
by striking 7y ago
Your code is no longer completely FOSS when you do that. It depends on a binary blob that you can't see into.
- pfortuny 7y agoYes, yes, but I guess BSD-licence-using developers do not care too much about it.
- astazangasta 7y agoDependencies are different than source code. You can write FOSS that runs on Windows, which is a dependency and not FOSS.
- bscphil 7y agoAs long as it doesn't require linking to a proprietary Windows library to interface with the NT api. That would violate at least the GPL 2. Though you could do it yourself, and release your own code as GPL (and the combined work as proprietary), no one else could distribute the full work under the GPL because of the incompatibility.
- richardwhiuk 7y agoYou can ship so long as it's not statically linked.
- dwaite 7y agoYou absolutely can do this - this is how the Nvidia shim driver works after all. What you can't do is write code which depends on GPL, then distribute it with those GPL components and insist the resulting package is not GPL. In fact, it's not so much 'dependent than derivative. GPL is a copyright license, and copyright restrictions can only only flow to derivative works.