On Fri, Mar 26, 2004 at 03:21:31PM -0500, Nathanael Nerode wrote: > Chris Cheney wrote: > > > On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 07:41:07PM -0600, Chris Cheney wrote: > >> On Fri, Mar 26, 2004 at 12:01:14AM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote: > >> -snip- > >> > Sophistry. It's clearly the form you "preferred" when you were writing > >> > it. The GPL does not require that programs be well-written, it merely > >> > requires a level playing field. > >> > >> So binary firmware is ok as long as it was not the vendor that wrote > >> the driver? Wow isn't that ingenious. :P > > > > Actually a reverse engineered driver with blobs in it is probably > Was it reverse-engineered using a "Chinese Wall" system, under which the > people writing the driver *never saw* the proprietary driver? :-) If so, > you're OK. Otherwise..... It was done via usb sniffing, not sure if that qualifies or not. No decompilation of the driver itself was done by me (others may have later). > > illegal since it is reproducing copyrighted code, I forgot to mention > > that earlier. :) > Yes, if the blobs are > (1) large and creative enough to be copyrightable > (2) not covered under 'fair use' > > > BTW - I know of at least one other driver in the linux kernels like > > that, the one I wrote: kernel/drivers/usb/media/vicam.ko > If you actually extracted those setup4[] bytes from a proprietary binary > driver, then the vicam.c driver is probably completely undistributable, > yes. :-P Regardless of where the blob came from it still wouldn't be the preferred form, correct? ;) Chris
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