Re: Would I be violating the GPL?

[Alexander Fisher <alexjfisher@gmail.com>]

On 11/1/05, Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-11-01 at 20:00 +0100, 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.
>
> Seems excessive, why not just use a kernel debugger to capture all PIO
> traffic to the device and write a driver based on that?

Interesting, I hadn't thought of that.  Alternatively, if I really
wanted to upset them (which I don't), I could use one of the very
expensive PCI bus analysers we've bought off them in the past!

Alex