You can take an XFree86 driver, regardless of what the copyright says, and completely rewrite it as an fbdev driver (which is what I believe usually happens) and this is not a violation of the XFree86 copyright or even of the GPL. Copyright doesn't apply to ideas or algorithms in a work. It's not a patent. It only applies to the reproduction of the code.
Mark.
Those are valuable comments, but just to highlight some distinctions, here's a common analogy...
If we both take a picture of the grand canyon and copyright it, each can be distributed without infringing the other.
If you record a country-western song, and I listen to it and record it as a jazz ballad, do you deserve acknowlegement?
If the melody is the same, yes. However, a melody is no algorithm, it's a creative work in the area of music (which is positively covered by copyright law, while algorithms and ideas are not). Software has been considered a creative work of literature for a long time until many countries expressedly added "software" to the list of creative works in copyright law. However, only the very implementation is covered and protected, not the idea behind it. The idea (or the algorithm) can only be protected by patent law in a few countries like the US and Japan.
Pure data (like some C headers and register contents table) are neither an "idea" nor "software", hence not copyrightable.
Thomas
-- Thomas Winischhofer Vienna/Austria thomas AT winischhofer DOT net http://www.winischhofer.net/ twini AT xfree86 DOT org _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
