I'm talking about that if a proprietary driver that links to the linux kernel is a derivative work then surely an open source driver linking to the Windows kernel is too.
I'm not a lawyer, but I totally sure that all Windows APIs that used by drivers and programs have clear statement within license that licensing is not "viral".
GPL is opposite. It's clearly state that your code depend on GPLed code become derivative work.
It seems that you are under the impression that the license can determine whether or not something that uses or interfaces with some program is a derivative work of that program.
That is not the case.
The answer to whether or not X is a derivate work of Y is the same regardless of the license of Y. It is answered by looking at how much of Y's copyrighted expression has been incorporated into X.
All the license of Y determines is whether or not, in the case that X is a derivative work, that making or distributing such a derivative work is allowed.
Some licenses have contributed to confusion over this by using terms like "derived work" or "derived from", which people confuse with "derivative work".
I didn't say it would infringe on anything just that it would be a derivative.
Maybe that was a bad example though, but do we really want to disallow opensource project from extending proprietary software without the blessing of the copyright owner? Because that is the other side of the coin.
It's depend on what you mean as "extending": official module/plugin or process memory patching. Some example would be helpful if you seriously want to discuss it.
Though for officially supported add ons system of proprietary products usually state what license you can or can't use. All kind of tools that access and patch process memory are not in danger because most of time they modify process state via 3rd party OS APIs and they do not interact with programs they patching.
In same time changes that patcher do within process can't go under GPL and fact that developers keep licensing that code under open source licenses doesn't change the fact it's break EULA.
