@“Peter_Viscarola_(OSR)” said:
Can you give us a citation, please? I been doing this (drivers for Windows) for a while now, and I’ve never heard that before. I’m not saying you’re wrong… I’m just saying I’m really, really, surprised.
it’s governed by the section 7.g of the Windows Compatibility Program and Driver Quality Attestment Testing Agreement:
(g) Drivers and BIOSes are not, and when delivered to Microsoft will not be, in whole or in part, governed by an Excluded License. An “Excluded License” is any license that requires, as a condition of use, modification and/or distribution of software subject to the Excluded License, that such software and/or other software combined and/or distributed with such software be (i) disclosed or distributed in source code form; (ii) licensed for the purpose of making derivative works; or (iii) redistributable at no charge.
When I first heard about such restriction, I went googling, and among others found the following discussion about this matter:
https://libusb-win32-devel.narkive.com/0CaoKh07/whql-testing-agreement-and-gplv3-conflicts
It contains also information from a user who contacted Microsoft directly, and their legal department confirmed that GPL is indeed not accepted. Even though the thread starts with GPLv3, the same is applicable to GPLv2 (which is also confirmed by a quote from Microsoft).