Odd that he doesn't explicitly mention the legal basis for Google's claim that this stuff is non-copyrightable. Which is this: Copyright protects the expressi

Odd that he doesn't explicitly mention the legal basis for Google's claim that this stuff is non-copyrightable. Which is this: Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. So, the courts have held, if you don't have any choice over how to express something, it isn't subject to copyright protection. In particular, if a particular mapping from names to magic numbers is necessary in order for standard-conformant programs to operate at all (as in the mappings specified by <errno.h> and <signal.h>, which came up in the SCO litigation), that stuff isn't copyrightable. So, Google's saying, they've written tooling to explicitly drop all the expressive elements, leaving the bare, functional, non-copyrightable bones --- which they don't need legal permission to use, from Linus or anyone else. This is, I guess, why Mueller thinks it's a big deal that the processed files still include inline functions --- if there's another way to write the function which does the same thing, then there is an expressive choice in writing it, which would be subject to copyright protection. But if userland code has no reason to want to run particular inline functions in kernel header files, then Google has an easy remedy: just ditch 'em --- or rewrite the few that matter, and ditch the rest. So, this really doesn't look like a big deal...