> Totally violates the spirit of the GPL. In the specific, I think the relevant part is whether the kernel component and the userspace component are an Aggrega

> Totally violates the spirit of the GPL. In the specific, I think the relevant part is whether the kernel component and the userspace component are an Aggregate or not for the purposes of GPL virality. From the gnu.org GPL FAQ: > Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged). If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program. By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program. I agree we're somewhere murky within the last paragraph. The mechanism is separated well enough - the kernel driver is just IOCTLs over a pipe. The semantics are certainly carrying complex internal data structures, however, those data structures aren't part of any GPL program at all. So perhaps it's not really anti-GPL - but it is certainly useless in a fully Free environment.