> The GPL does not require to release the source publicly, only to the same people you distribute binaries to. You're emphasising the distinction between makin

> The GPL does not require to release the source publicly, only to the same people you distribute binaries to. You're emphasising the distinction between making GPL'ed source-code available to your customers specifically, and making it available publicly online. In practice there is little difference. Few companies bother hoping no customer will post the source publicly (which the customers are permitted to do under the GPL). In practical terms the decision is between not releasing, or releasing to the public including the source-code. In a world where the Internet didn't make distribution of software trivially easy, things might be different. Of course, there are some notable exceptions, the most prominent being nVidia's probably-non-compliant proprietary graphics driver. A fair bit has been written about that. > Therefore the sharing back that does happen is down to culture not to the license. No, Torvalds has it right. Proprietary freeware kernel modules are forbidden outright, as you are not permitted to publicly release the binary without also releasing the source. As I described, 'contained' distribution of source-code isn't a practical option. The decision of what to merge into the mainline kernel is of course up to the kernel developers. There's no other way it could be.