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0 pointsmakeworld2y ago0 comments

As the author of the changes, I thought you can license them however you wish. What you're contributing is basically a diff, I don't think that counts as a derivative work as you wrote all the content. If you distributed your change with the original repo that sounds more like a derivative work to me.

https://indieopensource.com/public-private/contributors

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sidewndr462y ago· 1 in thread

what you're describing would make end-running the GPL absurdly easy. Vendors would just distribute vanilla Linux source code and in another file distribute their not-a-derivative patches under their own proprietary license.

Patches are obviously a derivative work. No one spontaneously describes deleting several lines of code & then replacing it with other lines of code.

makeworldOP2y ago

My understanding is that that would be legal. The problem for those companies is they can't build and distribute a Linux kernel that contains those patches, because then that is a derivative work. So in practice they have to release their changes under the GPL as it's not feasible to ask users to compile their own kernel with their custom patches.

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