Hello, ... It has been my intention of packaging the unicorn driver for Bewan ADSL modems (PCI st and USB). I have contacted upstream about the licencing issues (original upstream did not have any licence with the drivers they distribute), and they are willing to release the driver under a free licence. Since this is a linux kernel module, the GPL makes the most sense for this.
There is a problem though, the current module contains code they control plus a piece of proprietary code implementing a software ADSL decoder or somethign such, which they don't have the sources for. The ideal solution would be to move the proprietary part out of the the actual kernel driver and into userspace, and they are working on this, i think, but it is still not ready. Now, i believe that releasing this driver, in its current state, without moving the proprietary part into userspace, under the GPL is wrong, since they are linking proprietary closed source code, which will break the GPL of their driver and the linux kernel. I told them to check on this and they responded me that they have no experience with open source licences. So if i could get some advice on this or some pointer on to how best to solve this problem, it would be very nice. Would it be possible to release this under a GPL + exception licence, or something such ? It would still taint the kernel, and have to go into non-free, but at least the code they wrote would be GPLed. Also, i guess i cannot put a proprietary closed source stuff into even non-free, without at least a permission to redistribute it. I will encounter i guess the same kind of problems when they move the proprietary part to userspace, i guess. Friendly, Sven Luther
