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On 11/1/05, Michael Buesch <mbuesch@freenet.de> wrote: > 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. I've got the source code to the device firmware too. So despite the fact the driver has been written in c++, it might be possible to write a usable specification. This isn't something I want to do. I'd imagine this sort of action can really ruin a supplier/customer relationship. What good is a GPLed driver if no one is prepared to sell you the hardware? So if the conclusion is that the driver can't be distributed under anything other than the GPL (further opinions/confirmations welcome), I think I've got two options. Find a different hardware vendor or convince the current supplier to relicense their code. I'm hoping that the opinions from one or two major linux kernel copyright holders will help me in convincing them to do this. Thanks, Alex - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ | ||||||||||||
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