Re: [PATCH] USB: mark USB drivers as being GPL only

Greg KH
2008-02-01T17:40:40Z

On Fri, Feb 01, 2008 at 03:45:07PM +0100, Gilles Espinasse wrote:
> >FYI, this is a patch that will be sent out in the next round to Linus
> >for inclusion in 2.6.25.
> >
> >If anyone has any objections about it, please let me know.
> >
> ..
> > There are no known closed source USB drivers in the wild, so this
> > patch should cause no problems.
>
> There is the unicorn usb adsl modem driver (STM unicorn chip).
> http://www.bewan.com/bewan/drivers/A1012-A1006-A904-A888-A983-0.9.3.tgz
> There is some sources and a binary blob to be linked.
>
> The only things I know from the binary blob is that sources should be 150 000
> lines of C++.

Wow, larger than all the in-kernel USB drivers, and the USB core
combined. That's an impressive display of horrible code :)

> Driver compile with gcc-3 but not with gcc-4 (because of the binary blob).

So they aren't even being used by modern distros, so there's not much to
worry about here...

thanks for the info.

greg k-h