Brion-
Coupla notes:
* Said modules are distributed by their copyright owners with the
supported hardware, not as part of the Linux kernel.
* The Linux kernel runs just fine without them. The modules provide
additional support for certain hardware only.
* Said linking is done at run time on the user's machine; the combined
result exists only in memory and is never redistributed.
So by analogy "Linus Torvalds style
pragmatism" might provide for a
third-party filter program that inserts non-FDL images into Wikipedia
articles on a reader's computer as they're loaded. ;)
Since Wikipedia is a client/server application, you also have to look at
what the server is doing. Image data is actually stored in a separate
table; they have their own namespaces and are transcluded on demand as a
page is fetched, so the analogy is applicable. Keep in mind that the FDL
is primarily intended to cover printed documents, so it may well offer us
a pretty decent loophole here.
The text [[Image:foo.png]] is, of course, under the FDL.
I'm sure if we pay a bunch of lawyers enough money, they can up with
plenty of reasons why using fair use content is perfectly acceptable. We
may need to do so for a reason that has so far been ignored in the
discussion:
Quotes of any length are fair use, too. It is quite clear that we cannot
do without them. We could move them into a separate namespace and
transclude them, though, which would actually be a very Xanadu-esque thing
to do.
Regards,
Erik