It's not really that clear cut. According to Linus, as long as they aren't writing a derivative work and they only use the public kernel interfaces then it's al

It's not really that clear cut. According to Linus, as long as they aren't writing a derivative work and they only use the public kernel interfaces then it's all good. That view isn't held by all of the contributors however. The only people who would have standing to take any legal action however, probably aren't really going to care enough about it. If a Linux distribution decides to include it, I imagine a few high profile people will write angry blog posts, but that's about it. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Loadable_kernel_modules_and_firmware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Loadable_kernel_mo...