Re: w35und: good news about licensing

From: Pavel Machek
Date: Fri Apr 25 2008 - 07:12:09 EST


Hi!

> > > Actually you are about month early to the party ;-). We are trying to
> > > clean up winbond usb wireless driver, so that it can think about
> > > inclusion in kernel.
> > >
> > > http://code.google.com/p/winbondport/
> > >
> > > Unfortunately, original driver carries its own 802.11 stack with it;
> > > that needs to be stripped down. (And then code needs to be rewritten
> > > due to horrible coding style).
> >
> > I see...OK.
> >
> > Did you get any legal advice regarding whether or not
> > MODULE_LICENSE("GPL") was sufficient to proclaim the driver as covered
> > by the GPL?
>
> I dislike talking to lawyers, do not have any easily physically
> reachable, and believe the case is pretty clear...
>
> ...plus, we plan to rewrite the driver, anyway...

Ok, so I did actually talk to a lawyer that happened to be nearby. We
did short analysis, and we believe that yes, w35und is under GPL. The
only problem is in wpa/ subdirectory where md5 (IIRC) is under RSA
license.

wpa/ subdirectory is already empty in my version, so we should be ok.

Pavel
--
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
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