I saw that several companies are using the M-Systems
(http://www.m-sys.com) disk-on-chip products with Linux. It emulates a
hard disk with flash memory.
This disk-on-chip is not like an IDE drive, so it needs a special
block driver. The driver is provided by M-Systems in binary form only.
Since this disk-on-chip is used for booting, the binary Linux driver
is statically linked with the Linux kernel (it is *not* a module).
My question is: is it legal ? Do Linus & the other copyright holders
of Linux allow that a binary only driver is statically linked with the
kernel ?
Whatever the answer is, a clear announcement must be made because many
companies are actually shipping products with this driver in the
Linux kernel.
Fabrice.
