make kernel driver closed

[Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu]

On Mon, 27 Jan 2014 17:19:46 +0000, Jeff Haran said:

> There are lots of companies with closed source Linux drivers. My former
> employer Brocade Communications Systems wrote, maintained and shipped their
> Fiberchannel stack Linux drivers consisting of tens of thousands of lines of
> closed source code for years and though I am no longer with that company to my
> knowledge they continue to do so today

They appear to be in full compliance with the GPL:

http://www.brocade.com/services-support/drivers-downloads/oscd/FabricOS510.page

Note that there's nothing that prohibits a company from shipping a product
that has an open Linux kernel, and the "tens of thousands of lines of
closed source code" is all in userspace.

So unless you have actual proof that the Brocade switches have *kernel* code
that hasn't been offered to the users, they're not (as far as I can tell)
doing anything illegal.
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