At Mon, 19 Jan 2004 18:15:03 +0100, Michal Kostrzewa wrote: > > Hello, > > Please help me in that license related case: > I want to write a Lynx AES16 (http://www.lynxstudio.com/aes16.html) ALSA > driver (I'm from Warsaw University of Technology and we want to use this > card in our investigations). I wrote to Lynxstudio, and I received an > answer that driver related specs are accessible under terms of > Non-Disclosure Agreement which doesn't allow distribution of source code > or any derived materials thus preventing development of ALSA driver as > ALSA drivers are open source. > > My question is: has an ALSA driver to be an open source? On > www.alsa-project.org there is a sentence: "ALSA is released under the > GPL (GNU General Public license) and the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public > License)." (please note the LGPL).
all the driver stuffs are distributed under GPL, while the ALSA libary is under LGPL. the user-space programs are all under GPL, so far. > I understand, that there can be a > driver distributed in binary form (e.g in fact firmware needed to run > hdsp are distributed in binary form), GPL means that you cannot close > the ALSA core framework. the modules which use the ALSA kernel API have to follow the GPL rule. if you load the firmware separately from the external program, it's a different thing. the firmware loader is nothing but an application. > Is this whole situation hopeless? Have I any arguments to use in the > discussion with Lynxstudio? don't think of releasing the binary-only modules on linux. it's just a nightmare. if the firmware matters, it's avoidable by putting it outside of the kernel (which is anyway preferred), and creating a proper loader program. but the driver code itself must be open source. Takashi ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn _______________________________________________ Alsa-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-devel
