Re: Lynx AES16 driver

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Mon, 19 Jan 2004 18:15:03 +0100,
Michal Kostrzewa wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Please help me in that license related case:
> I want to write a Lynx AES16 (http://www.lynxstudio.com/aes16.html) ALSA
> driver (I'm from Warsaw University of Technology and we want to use this
> card in our investigations). I wrote to Lynxstudio, and I received an
> answer that driver related specs are accessible under terms of
> Non-Disclosure Agreement which doesn't allow distribution of source code
> or any derived materials thus preventing development of ALSA driver as
> ALSA drivers are open source.
> 
> My question is: has an ALSA driver to be an open source? On
> www.alsa-project.org there is a sentence: "ALSA is released under the
> GPL (GNU General Public license) and the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public
> License)." (please note the LGPL).

all the driver stuffs are distributed under GPL, while the ALSA libary
is under LGPL.  the user-space programs are all under GPL, so far.

> I understand, that there can be a
> driver distributed in binary form (e.g in fact firmware needed to run
> hdsp are distributed in binary form), GPL means that you cannot close
> the ALSA core framework. 

the modules which use the ALSA kernel API have to follow the GPL
rule.  if you load the firmware separately from the external program,
it's a different thing.  the firmware loader is nothing but an
application.

> Is this whole situation hopeless? Have I any arguments to use in the
> discussion with Lynxstudio?

don't think of releasing the binary-only modules on linux.
it's just a nightmare.

if the firmware matters, it's avoidable by putting it outside of the
kernel (which is anyway preferred), and creating a proper loader
program.  but the driver code itself must be open source.


Takashi


-------------------------------------------------------
The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004
Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration
See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA.
http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn