;From section 2 of the GPL: "If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it." 

  

 This is why NVidia make a closed-source binary Linux driver for their graphics cards, but users have to download it separately; no distribution is allowed to make it available with the GPL'd linux kernel. 

  

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