On Thu, 03 Mar 2005 21:17:43 +0100, Axel Thimm wrote: > > > By the way, does Hauppauge give out specs to their USB devices, > > their Nova-Ci or the elderly IBM chips in the mvp? > > Are you asking for such, or is this rhetorical/academic? AFAIK most > about the MVP is already published, since it was GPL to begin > with. The IBM kernel modules are not, and getting IBM to release them > is quite difficult. It's easy to blame that on Hauppauge, too, I guess > =2E..
Let me clarify, with respect to the MVP. Hauppauge violated the GPL with their original MVP release, by putting their audio/video player inside busybox and not releasing it. They split it out in later releases, but I don't believe they ever rectified the original mistake (ie, the MVP is still listed on the Busybox Hall-of-Shame). Hauppauge never released any specs related to the MVP, nor did they ever release any code (aside from vanilla Busybox and the MontaVista Linux 2.1 kernel). We all assumed this was due to NDAs with IBM, but I never heard a straight answer on that. A few people (myself included) reversed engineered the Hauppauge code and figured out how to do interesting things on the MVP itself. It didn't take too long before we could do more things on the MVP than the Hauppauge code could do. At that point, the fact that Hauppauge wasn't releasing anything became a moot point. Recently, someone with a stb02500 development kit gave the IBM kernel module source to an MVP user who asked for them. I wouldn't exactly call that a source release. Basically, IBM had their standard low-level copyrights all over them (like I've seen on PIBS, EPOS, etc.), which basically says you can do whatever you want with the source. So in short, everything done with the MVP up until now has been done blind. But that may change, since the driver source is now out in the open. However, I'd blame IBM for that situation. I have seen their commercials (before I became a MythTV user :-) talking about how open source was so wonderful, but in this case they were being very closed. Of course, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Hauppauge is to blame for some or all of this, but I don't believe that at the moment. Jon
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