On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 05:21:01PM -0400, Marvin Stodolsky wrote:
Zello Is considering 2) & 3) below. It would be good to have
opinions
on Legality of these approaches.
Ask lawyers about legality. There are legal folks willing to help on
the free software side. One obvious comment as a non-lawyer: It is normally
considered that to write a free driver having read non-free code (or a non
free one with a different licence) that you should have different people
writing the driver who haven't seen the original code using documentation
describing the device *not the code* from people who have (ie a 'clean room')
3) - we can move the usb driver in userspace (if it's possible, I
did
not try as I ain't got an usb modem to test), using /proc/bus/usb &
libusb. There's no need to adhere to gpl if we stay in userland.
Moreover, since libusb seems to be portable, it would be a step
towards porting slusb & slmodem under *bsd and other unices. I don't
know if I got the skills, but I got no modem to test, that's sure.
It should be possible. Linux 2.4 can't handle a few cases this way but
libusb and 2.6 should be able to drive pretty much any USB device sanely.
For #2 I guess it depends how easy it is to document the behaviour and
how complex the device behaviour is.
Alan