Re: [linux-usb-devel] New, yet unsupported USB-Ethernet adaptor

[Michael Helmling <supermihi@web.de>]

On Wednesday 03 May 2006 00:09, David Brownell wrote:
> On Tuesday 02 May 2006 11:02 am, Michael Helmling wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I bought an USB-Ethernet adaptor from delock (www.delock.de) and found it 
was 
> > not supported by linux from the vendor. So I played a little with lsusb 
and 
> > found it uses a MCS7830 chip from MosChip semiconductor (moschip.com). On 
> > their homepage I found a driver but it only was a precompiled Fedora4 
module. 
> > So I wrote them an email and they sent me the whole source code for the 
> > module...
> >
> > Would be nice to see this supported in further kernel releases.
> > The sourcecode can be found at ftp://supermihi.myftp.org
> 
> Was it you who removed the copyrights from the "usbnet" driver and
> changed the author assertion to one "M Subrahmanya Srihdar" ??
> I'm guessing the latter; the www.moschip.com site implies that
> its engineering HW is in India.

No, I did not change the code in any way, it is exactly the version they 
mailed me. But I don't really understand what you are saying about the usbnet 
module. They gave me the sourcecode for a yet not available kernel module 
"mcs7830", not usbnet. Or did they just modify usbnet? I don't know enough 
about such things to distinguish from both. 
> 
> Either way, blatant plagiarism and theft of copyright is unlikely
> to get into upstream kernels.

I personally have the feeling that they didn't do this by purpose. They were 
very willing to help me with the driver and don't seem to understand much of 
kernel development. Anyway, if this IS a copyright violation, they should 
really change it quickly.
> 
> Likewise, that is NOT the way to integrate with the "usbnet" driver
> framework.  See how it's done by the "asix.c" driver module.
> 
Sorry this isn't useful for me, I'm not a developer, more than ever no kernel 
developer. ;)
> 
> In fact, I'm very tempted to ask them to withdraw their distribution,
> since they have clearly violated pretty basic terms of the GPL. 
Maybe you should do this, since I don't know much about the details of GPL and 
my english is really bad. *g*
> How 
> long have they been doing that?  How much money have they made by
> this theft?


> 
> That stuff is correctible ... but until they correct their problems,
> I'm not inclined to let them continue distributing stolen software.
> 
This is comprehensible. But, nevertheless this is the possibility of 
supporting another hardware device in linux, and we shouldn't forsake it.


- Michael

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