From the course: Linux Device Drivers: Reading, Writing, and Debugging

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Work with licensing and modules

Work with licensing and modules - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Linux Device Drivers: Reading, Writing, and Debugging

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Work with licensing and modules

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- [Instructor] One more important thing about writing drivers and modules that is using the API in the kernel or the API from other modules. It turns out that you can only use symbols that are made visible, that are exported and some symbols are exported so that they're only visible to modules that reported that they have a GPL license by using the module license macro. So you can't ignore this and it's valuable if you can license your module as GPL, because then there's more API that you can use in your module. So the GPL is the GNU general public license. There have been multiple versions of that, but in general you could just say GPL and much of the Linux kernel is licensed with the GPL and it's one of the best known open source licenses. So there needs to be a module license in your module somewhere and you need to put a string in there as to what the license is. And you can see when I did a search in the Linux kernel source code 6.8 0.0, I got some different instances of what…

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