Also, if it is not clear, this was raised inside Gentoo. There was a discussion involving this with myself, the ZoL project lead, the concerned developer and a member of the licensing team who had final call on the matter. The descriptions of what was being done and why it should be okay passed review.
Except as it stands, Oracle have now won cases in the US courts that designate them copyrightable, have they not?
Despite their occasional enthusiasm for overturning the Federal Circuit, the Supreme Court denied cert in the case, so this probably won't be settled any time soon.
So then the question is, why is "nvidia.ko"'s binary blob not a derivative of Linux? What's the logic that says one binary blob is a derivative work, and the other is not when they both are 'ELF binary with Linux metadata and Linux module entry points'.
I don't see at all why that follows. Why not both? Building a kernel module requires including headers and writing glue code to conform to the kernel API, which is licensed only under the GPLv2. It strains reason to argue that a ELF binary with Linux metadata and Linux module entry points registering functions to implement a Linux filesystem is "clearly not" derivative of Linux.