On Fri, 9 Aug 2002 11:04, Igor Izyumin wrote: > On Thursday 08 August 2002 07:52 pm, Leon Brooks wrote: >> No, I don't. But it _is_ a totally bogus excuse. Their competitors _will_ >> be clean-rooming their chips and disassembling their drivers anyway.
> I very much doubt that - it's too hard and too expensive. It's hard enough > to write drivers, and even harder to disassemble them. It's easier to > develop your own, I would think. But when you have full access to the > source code, it's a different story. Strongly disagree. I've done this myself, and a heck of a lot of Linux kernel drivers are the result of similar hackery. Source code _does_ make things easier, but it doesn't tell you how the chip was assembled. However, a simple photomicrograph of the chip does do that, and a disassembly does tell you most of the things that full source code would. It can certainly tell you *how* things need to be done to make the chip work, even if not always *why*. Disassembly is not hard to do, there are tools (including free and Free) which make 99% of the task automatic. > > It's > > one of those if-you-outlaw-guns-then-only-outlaws-will-have-guns > > problems. As things stand, *only* their competitors have access to their > > `secrets' and not you or I, not their more-or-less friends! What could be > > a worse situation than that? Better to also give their allies access, no? > Well, they won't really care; if their competitors do reverse engineer > their drivers, they will pay double for the drivers and will be left with a > technology that's a generation old. It's kinda like the joke about > stealing computer blueprints... by the time you steal them, they're already > outdated. Agree. > The goal is to make it harder - it's just like security screws > and warranty stickers on hardware. What, by a couple of days? Not significant. > > Some point-haired-boss moron lawyer makes that decision, not someone with > > their brains actually operating. > Yes, but that's the reality. An OEM won't permit their techies to > distribute drivers if it's not ok with the lawyerbots. Yes. Let's change that. Cheers; Leon
