On Sat, 2008-06-21 at 15:12 +0200, Sam Geeraerts wrote: > Peter and Jesse wrote: > > Almost every file in the directory ubuntu/media/gspcav1/ is full of hex > > tables. Many of them have names like static __u16 > > [driver_name]_start_data[][3]. > > > > Also, several of these files (in different directories) are identified > > as needing binary firmware on http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/firmware. > > Peter > > > > I've looked at a few of those files and it looks like most (all?) of > them are copyrighted by private individuals rather than companies. Some > of the comments say that the data has been reverse engineered by way of > USB snooping. I believe most webcams are similar to Winmodems: almost > all of the action happens in software. I can imagine that such software > would include some magic initialization data. > > I think the authors did enough snooping to get the devices to work, but > didn't bother to dig into it deeper to find out what all command codes > and data actually meant. Comments on some lines indicate that they did > find out for some parts of it. > > Despite the large amount of hex values and the code being rather terse > and vague, I don't think the code has been deliberately obfuscated. So I > think these files can be marked as free. I also don't immediately see > any evidence of a requirement for proprietary firmware apart from the > files that are included. > > This is just my subjective opinion. I don't know how these drivers are > usually developed. As long as someone more knowledgeable in this field > or one or more of the authors haven't confirmed this, it's probably > safer to mark them as non-free.
Maybe it would be a good idea to contact some of the individuals credited with the code or perhaps somebody knowledgeable in this kind of development to clear this up - possibly somebody in kernel development or similarly? Who would that be? _______________________________________________ gNewSense-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnewsense-users
