Good afternoon, gentlemen,
I'm not sure, that this is a right place to ask such questions but...
:-) Well. I'm currently working on USB SCSI interface module for mass
storage devices. Some standard protocols are already implemented, some
are partially implemented. Anyway the design of this module allows to
simply expand it for supporting another protocols that use same commands
sets and can act as SCSI devices.
I have seen in sources of the usb storage driver from Linux, that there
are many vendor-specific devices supported, that use non-standard
protocols. One from those specific devices is FREECOM external USB drive
that I have and going to support in my driver. I have looking for
alternative sources of information about FREECOM protocol but there are
no ones. People say that FREECOM staff is also not friendly to
third-part developers. Only Linux source code is available for me now.
The Question: Can I use this source as reference information about
FREECOM protocol for writing my own implementation under BSD license?
No, I'm not going to copy-paste any info from original sources. Work
with USB in Linux and BeOS is different - no chance to re-use. Only
ideas. I need just information how to initialize device, read/write
data, handle errors etc.
I'm afraid that such kind of using GPL-ed information can make my work
GPL-ed too. I cannot accept this because I hope that my work can be
useful in the future for implementing such mass-storages support in OBOS
and the GPL will be a problem in this case.
What do you think?
As variant I can support two versions of my module: basic with support
of only standard protocols under BSD license and "extended" with such
vendor-specific support under GPL.
Thank you for your Attention.
Kind Regards,
S.Zharski