Rereading your post, you are correct, I misinterpreted it. My apologies.
So you are saying the licence used for Bionic doesn't come into play if Google do a "clean room implementation" of the headers? If they do that, they can use any licence they like, since they are not using any copyrighted parts of the kernel.
This does leave me unsure on another point though. How does the GPL prevent the linking of a GPL library from a non-GPL binary? One can distribute the binary without including the library, so you aren't distributing it, and just using the headers from the library is apparently OK, as long as you do a clean implementation and don't use headers containing any inline functions. What legal mechanism does that leave for the GPL to prevent linking by non-gpl works? As I understand it the GPL is entirely based on copyright. If I never distribute the library in question, I never have to agree to the terms of the GPL since I never copy it (putting aside personal use of the library).
Comments
Rereading your post, you are correct, I misinterpreted it. My apologies.
So you are saying the licence used for Bionic doesn't come into play if Google do a "clean room implementation" of the headers? If they do that, they can use any licence they like, since they are not using any copyrighted parts of the kernel.
This does leave me unsure on another point though. How does the GPL prevent the linking of a GPL library from a non-GPL binary? One can distribute the binary without including the library, so you aren't distributing it, and just using the headers from the library is apparently OK, as long as you do a clean implementation and don't use headers containing any inline functions. What legal mechanism does that leave for the GPL to prevent linking by non-gpl works? As I understand it the GPL is entirely based on copyright. If I never distribute the library in question, I never have to agree to the terms of the GPL since I never copy it (putting aside personal use of the library).