27 Nov
2004
27 Nov
'04
4:37 p.m.
On Fri, 2004-11-26 at 11:05 -0800, Florin Andrei wrote:
On Fri, 2004-11-26 at 01:20 +0100, CK wrote:
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
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.