On 10/31/07, Michael Shiloh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The first legal issue was to allow for the distribution of the driver in > binary-only form. That was resolved. > > The next issue was technical, and resulted from the switch from OABI to > EABI. That issue has a number of workarounds (wrapper, chroot), but > unfortunately all these technical solutions raise another set of legal > issues.
That seems utterly ridiculous to me. A binary is a binary. If you have source and recompile it and release it as a new binary, what's the difference to the chip company? It's not exposing any more of their IP that they are so worried about, is it? And in the chroot case even less so. They gave you permission to distribute the existing binary, right? What's the difference, in what kind of packaging you ensconce it? Is it illegal to package it in a zip file too? To make it compatible with the new ABI, do you have to ask the chip company for the new binary, or do you actually have source? If that can't be resolved we could still downgrade to an old OpenMoko image with the old ABI and use the old gllin. So why can't they give us the existing gllin binary, so we can at least have a go at it in one way or another? And are they really so litigious and so antagonistic that they will go after FIC for distributing what is necessary to make their chip, of which FIC already bought a few thousand at least, actually do something? That's quite a business, selling chips which are expected to sit idle for their entire lives. I don't mean to shoot the messenger BTW... thanks for responding to this issue. _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
