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Date:      Wed, 13 Nov 2002 15:24:36 +0100
From:      Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>
To:        Daniel Lang <dl@leo.org>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: MOXA Intellio driver project 
Message-ID:  <94016.1037197476@critter.freebsd.dk>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 13 Nov 2002 13:50:06 %2B0100." <20021113125006.GB59661@atrbg11.informatik.tu-muenchen.de> 

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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.

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