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SubjectRe: Developing under NDA
On %M %N, Andrew E. Mileski wrote
> Just curious...I'd like to develop a driver for the Ricoh MP6200S CD-RW
> drive, which does packet writing. The programming info requires an NDA,
> so it cannot be distributed in source form.
>
> What do I have to worry about from the kernel and GNU camps?
> (ie. the driver would be a module dependent on kernel code, be compiled
> with GNU utilities, and not bound to any library).
>
> I'd probably have to charge for it too...likely $1 to keep it legal.
>
> Note: I've not signed anything yet, or even started development.
>
> P.S. I'm taking a leap of faith that Ricoh will approve my 1 man company.
>
> --
> Andrew E. Mileski mailto:aem@netcom.ca

One thing to worry about, assuming this would be against 2.1.X, is that
I am working on a major update to the kernel cdrom support. Step one
which I have already completed, is moving all the cdrom header files
to linux/drivers/cdrom leaving only a new and improved cdrom.h. Step
two is porting all of the 20 kinds of strange cdrom drivers to sit on
top of the generic cdrom driver by David A. van Leeuwen. In the process
I plan on throwing out all the redundant stuff that has been caused by
each the cdrom drivers having its own private way of doing things.

My recommendation is that you develop your device driver to sit on top
of the generic cdrom driver and then simply compile and distribute it
in binary format as a loadable kernel module. Sounds like you have an
interesting project on your hands.

-Erik

--
Erik B. Andersen Web: http://www.inconnect.com/~andersen/
email: andersee@debian.org
--This message was written using 73% post-consumer electrons--

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