Re: Fwd: For testers of Fedora Core development releases <fedora-test-list@redhat.com>

[Alan Cox <alan redhat com>]

On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 05:21:01PM -0400, Marvin Stodolsky wrote:
> Zello Is considering 2) & 3) below.  It would be good to have opinions
> on Legality of these approaches.

Ask lawyers about legality. There are legal folks willing to help on 
the free software side. One obvious comment as a non-lawyer: It is normally
considered that to write a free driver having read non-free code (or a non
free one with a different licence) that you should have different people
writing the driver who haven't seen the original code using documentation
describing the device *not the code* from people who have (ie a 'clean room')

> 3) - we can move the usb driver in userspace (if it's possible, I did
> not try as I ain't got an usb modem to test), using /proc/bus/usb &
> libusb. There's no need to adhere to gpl if we stay in userland.
> Moreover, since libusb seems to be portable, it would be a step
> towards porting slusb & slmodem under *bsd and other unices. I don't
> know if I got the skills, but I got no modem to test, that's sure.

It should be possible. Linux 2.4 can't handle a few cases this way but
libusb and 2.6 should be able to drive pretty much any USB device sanely.

For #2 I guess it depends how easy it is to document the behaviour and
how complex the device behaviour is.

Alan