On Friday 06 February 2009 20:17:10 Wolfgang Denk wrote: > Dear David, > > In message <200902060824.06851.david.jan...@protonic.nl> you wrote: > > I decided to try out Application Note AN3793 from Freescale (3D Graphics > > on the ADS512101 Board Using OpenGL ES). > > > > I started trying to load the provided (binary!) kernel modules into our > > kernel, but I am geeting errors inserting the modules using > > The binary kernel modules are a mess. Not only they are a pretty > clear GPL license violation (and I wonder what Freescale is going to > do to sort this out), but it effectively always locks you down to the
Sorry if this starts to get a little off-topic to this list... IANAL, so I won't argue about a binary-driver being by definition a GPL-violation or not, or if those "gray areas" that Linus mentioned in the past, apply in this case. Besides that, do you have another reason why this is a clear GPL-violation? > specific LTIB kernel version (and probably even to a specific DTS) > they were built against. Open source? Forget it. I never expected this driver to be Open-Source. I always supposed that we'd never be able to use the MBX because of this, and use the AXE instead (One of our applications needs some form of hardware accelerated image-scaling). But since I saw that application note, I couldn't resist trying it out, just to see how hard it is to actually use it. The point is made: Leaving aside the possible legal implications of the driver's existance, it still is an undoable job to get this working in a maintainable fashion. What could Freescale possibly do about this?... beats me. I don't know about the legal implications (again, IANAL), but what if there was a driver like NVidia's video drivers (i.e. binary object with a re-compileable shell around it to adapt it to other kernels)? Otherwise, I guess Freescale can just as well stop making the MPC5121e and just make MPC5123's instead (which continues to be an awesome chip nevertheless) :-) Best regards, -- David Jander Protonic Holland. _______________________________________________ Linuxppc-dev mailing list Linuxppc-dev@ozlabs.org https://ozlabs.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxppc-dev