On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 04:34:21PM -0800, Jeff Haran wrote:

Just curious, can you provide links to these cases?

No kernel cases ever became public, but the SAMBA team have lots of
public cases where they have successfully handled this type of case.

I've read the COPYING file at the top of the Linux source tree. I am not
a lawyer, but I don't see anything in it that would prohibit somebody
from taking the GPL kernel sources, changing the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL()s to
EXPORT_SYMBOL()s, publishing that modified kernel source as required by
the GPL license but then keep their module source that uses the now
non-GPL symbols private. It seems like it should be prohibited in the
spirit of open source, but I don't see any mention of these symbol
declarations in the license.

The license does not say anything about this, nor should it.

thanks,

greg k-h