Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2000 00:12:46 -0700 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: Marco van de Voort <marcov@stack.nl> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT Message-ID: <3A45A1EE.30138FDE@softweyr.com> References: <20001222084324.181F596EC@toad.stack.nl>
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Marco van de Voort wrote:
>
> [Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> > > Trouble is there is no consistency in the rulings.
> >
> > United States Code Title 17 Chapter 12 Section 1201 Subsection (f)
> >
> > My basic interpretation of this is, if you legally own a copy of the
> > software (firmware is software), you can legally reverse engineer the
> > software for the purpose of achiving interoperability. Therefore, if you
> > own a piece of hardware, and you have no driver for the hardware, or the
> > driver provided is not acceptable, you have the right to reverse engineer
> > the firmware in order to write your own driver, thereby achiving
> > interoperability.
>
> Exactly the same in Europe, only the sharing parts are new for me.
> The difference seems to be:
> The problem is that in the US, it is legal to override this with the
> licensing conditions. In Europe this right is inalienable.
No, it's not legal to override this with licensing conditions, but software
companies keep trying to do so.
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/
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