Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Atheros wi-fi card drivers (?) | From | Lee Revell <> | Date | Tue, 08 Mar 2005 15:13:59 -0500 |
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On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 17:26 +0000, Alan Cox wrote: > On Llu, 2005-03-07 at 15:45, Mateusz Berezecki wrote: > > I've been doing some reverse engineering of madwifi HAL (Hardware > > Abstraction Layer) object file recently. > > I ended up with an almost complete source code for one chipset so far > > and I was wondering if it is legal > > to publish such source code on the internet? > > You should normally avoid doing this. Instead write a description of the > chip registers and functions from the source you have produced and get > someone else to write a chip driver from that. This avoids the risk of > you being held to have "copied" their code - in the EU while you have > rights to reverse engineer for interoperability in general if you copy > their code that may still be a copyright violation. >
Just to clarify, this also applies to the USA.
> There is other code in the kernel where reverse engineering was used. >
Heh, that is putting it mildly. Linux driver support would be nowhere without reverse engineering.
Lee
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