From: Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
Organization: Boundaries Unlimited
To: "Jeff V. Merkey" <jmerkey@utah-nac.org>
Subject: Re: Would I be violating the GPL?
Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 16:04:53 -0600
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Cc: Michael Buesch <mbuesch@freenet.de>, alex@alexfisher.me.uk,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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On Tuesday 01 November 2005 11:44, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
> No, don't take the code without the suppliers permission.  It contains
> trade secrets and you can get into a ot of trouble if there's an
> agreement between the two of you.  Contact the supplier.  Tell them to
> abstract away thre kernel headers, or rewrite to remove them, or grant
> you persmission to open source the driver.  The UK is the land of
> frivilous lawsuits (I should know a lot about this :-)  ), so don;t
> expose yourself and breach any agreements.
>
> Jeff

Translation to what a sane person might have said:

Make sure you aren't bound by any non-disclosure agreements before posting a 
driver specification for public viewing.  Writing up such a spec from the 
source code (if the supplier didn't give you one) is probably a darn good 
idea either way, for your own internal maintenance purposes.  If you have the 
spare cycles...

Rob
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