[openbeos] Drivers & the GPL

>>>Who said we couldn't use linux drivers ?
>>>Just need to take care about where we put it, but we definitely can 
>>>port a linux driver.

If there's a need of porting drivers from other operating systems, why
not port them from the *BSDs? The've got a beautiful license, and the
drivers are there. The most promising examples would be the network
drivers [lots of them, excellent quality], parts of FreeBSD's USB
stack and some sound drivers, as far as I can see. In these cases, I
really wonder why people bother with the license issues on Linux
drivers if there are better [in terms of licensing] alternatives to
choose from.

With graphics drivers, the new XFree86 has a kind of generic interface
to binary drivers. A meta-driver to support binary XFree86 via this
generic interface would yield a lot of graphics support, even though
in a rather awkward fashion. The problem here would probably be
hardware autodetection. XFree86 uses a liberal license too.

People porting GPL drivers to OBOS in a third-party fashion (releasing
them separately) are not in violation of the GPL, as I see it, because
the MIT license is compatible with the GPL; however, this may very
well lead to the awkward situation of not being allowed to distribute
them with the operating system itself, and this is not what we want.

I'm just asking GNU about it.

Philipp

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