Re: [Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>] Re: Debian & BSD concerns
That's in-line with my understanding of the situation.
If you were to take the driver for some hardware and disassemble it,
then write a program that performed the same function based on that
disassembly, you would be violating the copyright because your work is
not original.
If on the other hand you were locked in a room with a computer and the
card, no driver, and you managed to write a driver for it based solely
on public domain information and the response of the card to your
efforts, then you would have an original work and could license it how
you see fit.
The tough part is being able to prove that you did not use any
proprietary info to generate your driver. While the onus may be on them
to show that you did use proprietary information, as soon as they point
out similarities in the way things are coded you will need to
demonstrate that any similarities are either a coincidence, or that any
engineer without specific knowledge could arrive at the same solution,
and furthermore, that is how you did it.
- Bruce
--
On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, Jonathan P Tomer wrote:
> actually i think certain forms of reverse engineering are illegal due
> to patent and/or copyright issues but it can be worked around by
> having one person run a lot of tests on a piece of equipment and
> another creating <whatever> to fit the specs as determined by the
> tester.
>
> i'm not certain about this, so please don't make the list suffer if
> i'm wrong.
>
> --p.
>
>
>
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