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Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 08:46:13 -0800
From: Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>
To: Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel@free.fr>
Cc: Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>, Rik van Riel <riel@imladris.surriel.com>,
       Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org>,
       Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@e-mind.com>,
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Subject: Re: openbkweb-0.0
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On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 05:23:10PM +0100, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> Le jeu 13/02/2003 ? 17:13, Larry McVoy a ?crit :
> 
> > We'd view reverse engineering the protocol as falling under the "you're
> > working on a competing implementation".  
> > 
> > The general message is that you are free to use BK but you aren't free
> > to use BK in any way which could hurt the business which produces BK.
> 
> If this kind of rule was enforced, lots of drivers wouldn't have
> existed. You can't do much against reverse engineering.

The analogy doesn't work.  Companies make money by selling the hardware,
having a free driver out there tends to just make them sell more hardware.

Furthermore, you bought one of their cards to reverse engineer the driver.

The situation here is that you have a product given to you for free.  Your
right to use that product is conditional on you not reverse engineering it.
If we were 3com and we had some nifty card and we were *giving* you cards
for free, it would be well within our rights to say "here are the rules,
if you don't like these rules then you have to pay for the card".
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm 
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