February 1998
Intermediate to advanced
439 pages
13h 46m
English
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License Terms
Linux is licensed with the GNU ``General Public License'' (GPL), a document devised for the GNU project by the Free Software Foundation. The GPL allows anybody to redistribute, and also sell, a GPL’d product, as long as the recipient is allowed to rebuild an exact copy of the binary files from source. Additionally, any software product derived from a GPL’d product must be released under the GPL.
The main goal of such a licence is to allow the growth of knowledge
by permitting everybody to modify programs at will; at the same time,
people selling software to the public can still do their job. Despite
this simple objective, there’s an ongoing discussion about the GPL
and its use. If you want to read the license, you can find it in
several places in your system, including the directory
/usr/src/linux, as a file called COPYING.
As far as third-party and custom modules are concerned, they’re not part of the Linux kernel, and thus you’re not forced to license them under the GPL. A module uses the kernel through a well-defined interface, but is not part of it, similar to the way user programs use the kernel through system calls.
In brief, if your code goes in the kernel, you must use the GPL as soon as you release the code. Although personal use of your changes doesn’t force the GPL on, if you distribute your code you must include the source code in the distribution—people acquiring your package must be allowed to rebuild the binary at will. If you write a module, on the ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.