Re: Would I be violating the GPL?

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

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?

Lee