From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Nov 13 6:24:59 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AD0D337B401 for ; Wed, 13 Nov 2002 06:24:58 -0800 (PST) Received: from critter.freebsd.dk (critter.freebsd.dk [212.242.86.163]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BAF5843E77 for ; Wed, 13 Nov 2002 06:24:56 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from phk@critter.freebsd.dk) Received: from critter.freebsd.dk (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by critter.freebsd.dk (8.12.6/8.12.6) with ESMTP id gADEOaOr094017; Wed, 13 Nov 2002 15:24:37 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from phk@critter.freebsd.dk) To: Daniel Lang Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: MOXA Intellio driver project In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 13 Nov 2002 13:50:06 +0100." <20021113125006.GB59661@atrbg11.informatik.tu-muenchen.de> Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 15:24:36 +0100 Message-ID: <94016.1037197476@critter.freebsd.dk> From: Poul-Henning Kamp 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 In message <20021113125006.GB59661@atrbg11.informatik.tu-muenchen.de>, Daniel L ang writes: >MOXA is willig to send me the specs for this card, but I have to >sign an NDA. Now I'm not sure yet, how this will affect the >resulting driver code (provided, there is any). > >How should I proceed? Would binary only KLD driver still >be of some use? Is it likely, that I can publish the driver code >under BSD license, although protected specs from MOXA have been used? If you go this route, I would advice you study how I did it for the fla (sys/contrib/dev/fla) driver: All the vendor-tainted code is located in one .o file which is distributed in binary form. Try to put as little in that .o as possible, and the rest of the driver in un-tainted source-form. That way you can shield yourself from most if not all changes that happen in FreeBSD because those bits are in the .c file. >Regardless of these license issues, I'm not experienced in >programming device drivers or even system programming at all. Deep water is a great encitament to learn to swim :-) -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message