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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