On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 11:26 +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > Ar Llu, 2006-06-05 am 10:45 +0200, ysgrifennodd Arjan van de Ven: > > It's just that a cleanroom approach is a sure way to prove > > you didn't copy. That's all. > > Which is an extremely important detail especially if you have been > reverse engineering another driver for the same or similar OS where it > is likely that people will retain knowledge and copy rather than > re-implement things.
oh don't get me wrong, it's important to not copy from the original. (even if that original did copy from linux ;) > We've had "fun" with this before and the pwc camera driver. I don't want > to see a repeat of that. yet at the same time, the cleanroom approach is not the ONLY way to do it right. And making following that exact approach a strict requirement is just silly. And it would mean we'd need to remove quite a few drivers from the tree if you follow that logic. And to be fair the pwc camera driver was just a guy with a personality problem rather than any real legal standing. Again doing things right is important. But I would say that if you do the rev-engineering in Europe, just being careful and avoiding copying should be enough (well and certifying that you were in fact careful and didn't do any copying). - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
