Re: Would I be violating the GPL?

["Jeff V. Merkey" <jmerkey@utah-nac.org>]

Lee Revell wrote:

>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
>
>  
>
That's legal, and good advice.

Jeff

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