From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Oct 15 8: 4:38 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from ims1.imagestream.com (ims1.imagestream.com [205.159.243.5]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6A46A37B407; Mon, 15 Oct 2001 08:04:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (dhass@localhost) by ims1.imagestream.com (8.9.3/8.8.7) with SMTP id KAA23801; Mon, 15 Oct 2001 10:04:04 -0500 Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 10:04:03 -0500 (EST) From: Doug Hass To: Leo Bicknell Cc: Ted Mittelstaedt , Jim Bryant , MurrayTaylor , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, Alfred Shippen Subject: Re: FYI In-Reply-To: <20011015103507.B90657@ussenterprise.ufp.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > Would your agreements allow you to provide resources to a small > number of developers (under NDA and all that of course) to produce > drivers that you would then release in binary form (eg a kernel > module) under a free license? It sure would. > If you cannot release the source code to your drivers, can you > release hardware programming specifications (again, perhaps under > NDA) that allowed someone to develop an independant free licensed > driver? Unfortunately, the API to the cards (the driver development kit, hardware programming specifications or whatever you want to call them) are licensed from several third parties and we are bound by agreement not to make them public. The 400 series cards (and, for that matter, the RISCom/N2 series cards) did not require an API, which is how BSDI and FreeBSD drivers came about in the first place. As I mentioned above, we CAN license the driver code and the DDK for development. This means that you could produce FreeBSD drivers which we could then distribute in a binary form under a free end-user license. Regards, Doug ----- Doug Hass ImageStream Internet Solutions dhass@imagestream.com http://www.imagestream.com Office: 1-219-935-8484 Fax: 1-219-935-8488 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message