[openbeos] Re: Using GPL-ed sources as the reference
- From: Norman Robinson <norman_b_robinson@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 06:59:43 -0700 (PDT)
No.
You cannot take the code and relicense it without the
original author's permission. You *CAN* ask the author
to grant you a specific license (in your case a BSD
license) if you get it in writing. They are the
copyright (or copyleft in this instance ;) holder and
can grant as many individual licenses as they want.
I read your post. This isn't a clean-room
implementation. You just want to 'reference' source
code - one of the problems of knowledge, intent, and
purpose in having source code means that any
implementation you create is questionable. Even if
they reverse engineered the code from a closed,
proprietary source it isn't 'open' in the sense that
they own the code. GPL is no different than any
proprietary license (pretend you have Microsoft's code
in hand - treat it the same as that unless you are
producing a GPL version). If you do use the GPL code
and someone gets wind of it, they could force you to
withdraw your code entirely or require you accept
their license/make it GPL.
If they didn't get a license from the vendor and they
did reverse engineer it, they worked hard for their
efforts. The easiest thing would be to ask for
permission for a custom license just-in-case. I'd hate
for your hard work to be brought into question.
Hope this helps,
Norman
--- Siarzhuk Zharski <zharik@xxxxxx> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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