Re: question about proprietary libraries
On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 1:10 PM, The Fungi <fungi@yuggoth.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 02, 2010 at 12:46:09PM -0400, Stephen Sinclair wrote:
> [...]
>> I will assume for now that the vendor's policy is to allow people
>> to distribute their header files, since otherwise I can't think of
>> any legal way to write open source software that would use their
>> device.
>
> Do you have a (legally sound) reason to believe that the vendor even
> cares whether people write open source software for this device? For
> that matter, do you know that their header files aren't licensed to
> them by some non-transferrable agreement which allows the vendor to
> provide a copy to you but doesn't entitle you to pass them along to
> anyone else?
Not as far as I know, but I'll have to read the license in more
detail. I'm assuming for now that the headers are allowed to be
distributed. (For example, they can be found in their freely
available documentation.)
There are currently some other open source projects (not in Debian)
which are already dlopen'ing the library in question, so I think they
are okay with it.
Steve
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