Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 13th Jun 2006 11:59 UTC, submitted by SEJeff
KernelTrap reports on an interesting discussion on the lkml. The specific topic is the legality of the ACX1xx wireless driver, which, according to Andrew Morton, will be included in the next kernel release (2.6.18). Jeff Garzik opened the discussion: "I've never had technical objections to merging this, just AFAIK it had a highly questionable origin, namely being reverse-engineered in a non-clean-room environment that might leave Linux legally vulnerable." Christopher Hellwig posed an interesting point: "Please don't let this reverse engineering idiocy hinder wireless driver adoption, we're already falling far behind OpenBSD who are very successfully reverse engineering lots of wireless chipsets."
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Member since:
2005-10-18
it IS possible afaik, but I guess it has to do with pride. "I reverse engineered my OWN drivers! yay!" or something along those lines.
Besides, Reverse Engineering is GREAT cause it gives you more experience with hardware programing, something tha I feel EVERY OS writer should have and keep dear to his heart
Video card drivers would be GREAT, except I think there are slightly more restrictions, and there would be a more aggresive response. For example, to just DOWNLOAD nvidia drivers, you have to agree to a licence, which includes a "I promise not to reverse engineer..." section.
Overall I think that this is great. More people should reverse engineer! We need help!
--ZaNkY