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On 11/1/05, Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com> wrote: > On Tue, 2005-11-01 at 20:00 +0100, 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. > > Seems excessive, why not just use a kernel debugger to capture all PIO > traffic to the device and write a driver based on that? Interesting, I hadn't thought of that. Alternatively, if I really wanted to upset them (which I don't), I could use one of the very expensive PCI bus analysers we've bought off them in the past! 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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