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SubjectRe: Would I be violating the GPL?
Date
On Tuesday 01 November 2005 18:44, you wrote:
> No, don't take the code without the suppliers permission.

I interpreted his text as if he already has permission to use the code.

> It contains
> trade secrets and you can get into a ot of trouble if there's an
> agreement between the two of you. Contact the supplier. Tell them to
> abstract away thre kernel headers, or rewrite to remove them, or grant
> you persmission to open source the driver.

I did not say he should open source the driver. That will give trouble.
I suggested to write a _device_ specification. Driver specific things do not
care.

> The UK is the land of
> frivilous lawsuits (I should know a lot about this :-) ), so don;t
> expose yourself and breach any agreements.

Sure.

> Jeff
>
>
> Michael Buesch wrote:
>
> >On Tuesday 01 November 2005 18:49, Alexander Fisher wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Hello.
> >>
> >>A supplier of a PCI mezzanine digital IO card has provided a linux 2.4
> >>driver as source code. They have provided this code source with a
> >>license stating I won't redistribute it in anyway.
> >>My concern is that if I build this code into a module, I won't be able
> >>to distribute it to customers without violating either the GPL (by not
> >>distributing the source code), or the proprietary source code license
> >>as currently imposed by the supplier.
> >>From what I have read, this concern is only valid if the binary module
> >>is considered to be a 'derived work' of the kernel. The module source
> >>directly includes the following kernel headers :
> >>
> >>
> >
> >Take the code and write a specification for the device.
> >Should be fairly easy.
> >Someone else will pick up the spec and write a clean GPLed driver.
> >
> >Like these, without the reverse engineering part:
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall#Computer_science
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>

--
Greetings Michael.
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