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. > The UK is the land of > frivilous lawsuits (I should know a lot about this :-) ), so don;t > expose yourself and breach any agreements. Sure. > Jeff > > > 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. > > > >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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