On Fri, 2004-11-26 at 11:05 -0800, Florin Andrei wrote: > On Fri, 2004-11-26 at 01:20 +0100, CK wrote: > > > I still don't see the point, the GPL _protects_ their IP rights > > It only protects the source of the driver. > > > if I > > was the evil corporation trying to rip off rme I could aswell rip the > > thing apart and reverse engineer the code and the protocol, might still > > be cheaper than doing the r&d work. > > You're close. > It's most expensive to do your own R&D. > It's a bit cheaper to reverse engineer the products. > It's a lot more cheaper to just grab a GPL'd product and learn from it. > > That's why companies are wary of releasing GPL drivers.
They should do what Creative/EMU did for the emu10k1. Before releasing the opensource.creative.com drivers (making them among the first big players to support Linux by releasing GPL'ed drivers for a flagship product), they patented those aspects of hardware whose operation could be inferred by studying the open source driver. Problem solved. Lee
