The issue is all about "derivative works" in copyright law.
Ndiswrapper is in a good position because the closed-source drivers were
originally written for another OS so it's pretty well impossible to
argue that they are derived from linux.
However, if I were to write a new GPL shim and then a new closed-source
module that uses the shim to access kernel symbols, it is entirely
possible that a court could rule that my closed-source module is a
derivative work of the linux kernel because it was written specifically
to run on linux.
On the other hand if I were to sit down and write an OS-agnostic
proprietary chunk of code, and then write a new GPL shim to use it under
linux (and maybe other shim layers for other OS's as well), I _might_ be
okay. But I would have to be prepared to prove that the proprietary
code was not derived from the Linux kernel.
Chris
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