[openbeos] Re: Drivers & the GPL

However, bear in mind that FreeBSD's USB stuff isn't as up to date as say
NetBSD's and there are plenty of other examples out there :( It's worth
looking at the BSD's, but look at a few different ones, not just one.

david

> >>>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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