Hello! On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 10:42:43AM -0500, Nick ! wrote: >[...]
>Also, please educate me: couldn't a BSD driver be created by using the >cleanroom approach? One person reads the GPL code, writes specs, >another implements them? Or is this covered when people say "reverse >engineer"? That's exactly what was meant by "reverse engineer". Then, by reading the GPL code w/o hardware docs, you see only *that* the GPL driver is doing thisorthat, but not *why* exactly it's doing thisorthat at a specific point. And if thisorthat (e.g. peeking and poking around magical I/O addresses, using magical values/bit masks) doesn't work as it should, you don't know exactly in what way it deviates from the hardware spec, as you don't have access to it. I.e. difficult debugging, troubleshooting, maintenance. And the point of Theo & co is that it'd be much easier with open documentation. And you could identify points where things are done in an unnecessarily twisted/dirty/... way using the docs and eliminate them, even if you used a GPL driver as *additional* reference, together with docs. >-Nick Kind regards, Hannah.
