On 19-Jan-2004 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.
Yes, I got the same answer when I asked about the LynxTwo. > My question is: has an ALSA driver to be an open source? Yes, otherwise you have to release binary drivers for each ALSA version, kernel version, compiler, architecture. It's impossible. > 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). 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. If you split your driver in two parts: one (GPL) that interfaces with ALSA and the real driver (non-GPL). There are many examples. eg. The ToucamPro webcam driver, Nvidia drivers and my driver for Echoaudio soundcards. > Is this whole situation hopeless? Have I any arguments to use in the > discussion with Lynxstudio? Yep :( They don't like the "invasive" GPL. I can't understand those people. We are speaking about a *driver*. The card is the product they sell. Customers don't buy the card because they need to use the driver. -- Giuliano. ------------------------------------------------------- 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
