On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 12:00 PM, Josenivaldo Benito Junior <jrben...@benito.qsl.br> wrote: > Hello Greg, > Thanks for answering and I will comment below, please continue reading. > On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 16:10, Greg KH <gre...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Why are you asking legal questions on a developer mailing list? > > There is a miss understand here. I do not want legal advice at all.
You are asking about patents and licenses and other legal issues, not technical ones. >> Please contact a lawyer and work with them on this issue. > > No, it is a technical question, for one developer to another. > What I originally intended was to hear from developers what can be done > instead of use sysFS or if there is another way. The fact is, driver already > exist and is in use out the market. Wonderful, please point this out to me so that I might take legal action against the distributors of it. And yes, I'm serious, this is not allowed. > I am assuming it is totally legal and that someone cares about this fact. I care that this is NOT something that is legal to do. > What I just want to do is keep it as it > is now. If use sysFS makes it not compile or not compliant with GPL I do not > want to go that way, it is not what I am supposed to do. >> >> Note, the GPL does not prohibit releasing patent-covered code at all, >> this is done quite often, and the Linux kernel itself has lots of patent >> covered code in it, and everything is just fine. > > I totally agree with you and am aware BUT I am not patent neither copyright > holder. I have no rights to do this. This is not my business. Then I would recommend that you not have anything to do with this at all. >> All kernel code must be released under the GPL, so there's not really >> a "if I use this function or not" type thing going on, sorry. > > Here is somehow an answer to my question. If all is GPL so my assumption of > driver legality is wrong but I am not (and probably neither you) a > lawyer then I wise approach would be not go this way. I'm not a lawyer, but I deal with them on a weekly basis, and my code is the one you are considering violating the copyright on, so I do know all about this type of thing :) > Let's talk about other paths: > This discussion started due the change of a read permission in the > /dev/device_name file. Someone here strongly believe that others read > permission to any device driver is prohibited by Google CTS policy. Do you have a pointer to where this is stated? What type of driver is this that needs a character device node? thanks, greg k-h -- unsubscribe: android-kernel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com website: http://groups.google.com/group/android-kernel
