Subject: Re: Atheros wi-fi card drivers (?)
From: Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com>
To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: Mateusz Berezecki <mateuszb@gmail.com>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
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	 <1110216394.3072.72.camel@localhost.localdomain>
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Date: Tue, 08 Mar 2005 15:13:59 -0500
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On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 17:26 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Llu, 2005-03-07 at 15:45, Mateusz Berezecki wrote:
> > I've been doing some reverse engineering of madwifi HAL (Hardware 
> > Abstraction Layer) object file recently.
> > I ended up with an almost complete source code for one chipset so far 
> > and I was wondering if it is legal
> > to publish such source code on the internet?
> 
> You should normally avoid doing this. Instead write a description of the
> chip registers and functions from the source you have produced and get
> someone else to write a chip driver from that. This avoids the risk of
> you being held to have "copied" their code - in the EU while you have
> rights to reverse engineer for interoperability in general if you copy
> their code that may still be a copyright violation.
> 

Just to clarify, this also applies to the USA.

> There is other code in the kernel where reverse engineering was used. 
> 

Heh, that is putting it mildly.  Linux driver support would be nowhere
without reverse engineering.

Lee

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