Re: Broken nforce3 support in ALSA on amd64?

[Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com>]

On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 21:17 +0100, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> At Mon, 07 Mar 2005 15:06:05 -0500,
> Lee Revell wrote:
> IMO, the reverse-engineering is not the first thing to do.
> The h/w vendors don't want to open their specs -- unless the manager
> realizes that many users want it in the world.  So, crying out loudly
> to the h/w vendors would be the first.  I don't think it's been done
> quite enough yet in this case.  AFAIK, Nvidia guys don't know that the
> problem exists at all.
> 

Good point.  Although Nvidia's position on opening their drivers is well
known, their engineers have definitely helped open source developers
before.  Someone should really ask them, and post the results here.

> BTW, off-topic: is the reverse-engineering allowed in US, too?
> 

AIUI it's generally prohibited by the DMCA but there is an explicit
exception that allows reverse engineering for the purpose of creating
interoperable software.  The intention was to prevent people from using
the anti-reverse engineering provisions to implement vendor lock-in. 

IANAL, in fact all my legal knowledge comes from LKML and slashdot, but
I have interpreted this to mean that reverse engineering Windows drivers
to make Linux drivers is fair game.

Maybe the US courts will find one day that I don't have a right to write
a Linux driver for a device I paid for.  But until that happens, I am
not worried. 

Any US lawyers on this list?

Lee



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