You won't be able to boot from it, unless you compile your own kernel. This was pretty much the Soft Updates status, until recently.

The problem with the GPL clause 6 is that it prohibits any additional restrictions, and requiring the distribution of another license, even if it does not otherwise conflict, is a restriction on what can be done with the code. Without that other license, the right granted to you to use the code in question doesn't exist, since it is the license which was the origin of the grant.

Like Matt Dillon and Best Internet did with the Soft Updates code, a local administrator could use it, but it could not be distributed in a usable form.

Actually, this brings up a seperate sticky legal point, which is how the assets of Best Internet were transferred when it was sold, since I assume that the machines that had Soft Updates on them kept Soft Updates on them. I suppose that the new owners could have rebuilt the kernels on all the machines, getting identical kernels, after first booting to a non-Soft Updates kernel for the transfer of legal posession.

Distribution of a binary kernel module would really depend on whether you could get away with treating a kernel as a library, under the GPL allowing the linking of GPL'ed programs against system libraries. You have to wonder if a kernel module is a program or just a program component, with the kernel being the program. BeOS side-steps this for non-boot drivers by running the driver in a user space process, so it's provably a program.

Anyway, that's the kind of hoop-jumping that you _could_ do to get around the problem (maybe). I have no idea what the transfer of ownership caluses in the GPL would do if a company were to IPO, for example, or what the concept of "publically held" would mean on that context (since anyone who holds the ownership of the software can demand the source, and the source itself is not legal to distribute, under the conflicting licenses).

Not really my problem, though, since I tend to try to avoid just this sort of entanglement. So did IBM, when I was working for them. 8-).

[ ... boot MTBF ... ]

I'm not sure this works yet. Hardware RAID mirroing certainly would, since it'd have to deal with the BIOS boot device issue.

I had a pretty long discussion with their V.P. of engineering, who made the decision (they have a number of "V.P. of engineering" lying around). He didn't come out and say the same thing, and I really didn't attribute it to that, since it means that any bug fixes are GPL-code derived, and therefore also GPL. That would mean that they really don't expect any useful work to come out of the Linux community, or that they expected people to just sign over rights to anything interesting, which I think would be a bit naieve, to say the least.

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