As a first port of call I would recomend that someone contacts the
manufacturer and asks for permission to use the byte sequence. A parallel
port CD-ROM drive is not exactly rocket science, with plenty of models on
the market, they won't be giving anything to the `competition'. In fact
they are gaining support for another OS for free.
A second method would be to require the device driver to be around at build
time. This is the method I was planning to adopt if I could get hold of a PEI
or PEII as they suffer the same problem. Lets say the the driver is called
xxx.c, then in the makefile put that this depends upon xxx_firm.h say, and
include a rule for making xxx_firm.h, bye compiling a short C program,
scanning the device driver and dumping it to file. I believe I posted an
example to do just that for a Xircom PEI.
That would allow the full functionality of the device driver (no silly messing
about with loader programs). The only thing to watch is the distribution of
compiled versions of the driver containing the byte sequence. This brings me
nicely to my third point in the European Union, as I understand the law, the
byte sequence is not copyrightable as it is required for operating the device.
For those who doubt the validity of the above statement the European Union
issued a directive that all member states will have implemented as law. The
purpose of the directive is to provide for fair competition and try and
prevent abuse of a monopoly position in the computer industry. The rough gist
of the directive is that anything required for a hardware-hardware,
hardware-software, software-software or software-user interface is excluded
from copyright protection (and possibly patents as well but I am not to sure
here; the draft directive did at least).
JAB.
-- Jonathan A. Buzzard, 34 Kepwell Road, Prudhoe, Email: jab@hex.prestel.co.uk Northumberland. NE42 6PD Tel: +44(0)1661-832195 United Kingdom