Instead of thinking up schemes to try to circumvent the gpl, a policy which I am sure will cause you grief in the end, why not just learn how to properly create proprietary licensed code to run on a gpl based platform.

This link provides some useful discussion/info.

http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/i...50131065655645

As one poster suggested though, go consult a lawyer.

Also remember not all countries treat IP (copyright, patents, trademarks etc) the same.

rgds

This is not ridiculous nor pointless: it is what the nvidia propietary driver kernel module is doing.

While I am not a lawyer and certainly no licence expert, I still find anything that borders to principles of law kinda interesting, and some of the arguments in this thread fail when judged against these principles:

The law most certainly does not care to differentiate between "non-functional or minimally-functional stub" and "fully functional stubs". The law might differentiate on intent though, but probably not any much when it comes to licences and copyright law. Either it's legal for all and every stubs that use a technique not clearly mentioned in the licence, or it is illegal for all and every stub that use that same technique.

The law will not go into evaluations like "the original library is useless". It's all about principles and technicalities, not quality and featurerichness.

Indeed, but if the original library is useless then the intent is obviously to make use of the GPL library. If the original library is functional (but suboptimal) then the intent is far more difficult to prove.

Agreeing to anything here is totally irrelvant as the GPL only restricts *distribution* of software in certain ways, not running it.

Should it come to that, this thread goes a far bit in proving the intent... Again, I am not sure intent is relevant for the specific licencing/contract laws that would apply here.

Wow, I was gonna add to this, but after reading mmurfin87 and wmarone's comments, there's really nothing more I can add except to say that they're spot on. You can't add GPL stuff without at least a LGPL license. The only exception I know is if the modules are plugins, meaning they're optional components that just "snap in" and not physically required for the application's core functions to work. You could also get around it by having a "shim", IE, some kind of software API that was LGPL and acted as a go between for the GPL'ed code and the proprietary code. It's how Microsoft figured out how to run their apps on Linux without having to open source them, or release them under an open source license.