Re: [RFC] Echoaudio driver

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

Hi,

sorry I've overseen this post.

At Tue, 31 Aug 2004 11:17:10 +0200 (CEST),
Giuliano Pochini wrote:
> 
> 
> I'm developing the driver for Echoaudio cards for more
> than a year and it is stable and it supports almost all
> features of eight different soundcards. I think it's
> near ready for inclusion in the official ALSA distro. Is
> there someone who has time to have a look at the code ?

It looks fine except for exactly the below:


> There are some known issues, though:
> 
> - Licence. Part of the driver is based on the reference
> code released by the manufacturer with a BSD-like licence:
> http://www.echoaudio.com/Downloads/license_agreement.php
> and I'm not sure if it's fully GPL-compatible. (Firmwares
> and headers are mostly unchanged. *_Dsp.c are 70% a direct
> translation from C++ and the rest is all mine)

This is a problem.  BSD isn't GPL-compatible, of course :)
Usually the author provides BSD/GPL dual license to put into the
kernel tree.

I'd suggest either to ask Echo about the permission for BSD/GPL dual
license or to rewrite the BSD part.  Above all, the generic wrapper is
hated by kernel developers, so we'll need to rewrite them later
anyway.  So, I'd prefer rewriting them.


> - Userspace firmware loading is still missing.

The problem is similar, the license of this firmware is unclear.
Let's push it to user-space.  You can replace it easily with
request_firmware() (although it's for 2.6 kernels only).


> - Coding style: yes, I'll replace all C++ comments :)

Comments are relatively accepted, but the C++ style variables and
functions are disliked by many people...


Takashi


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