free firmware for 88W8388

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 14:40 -0500, Albert Cahalan wrote:
> Dan Williams writes:
> 
> > No, you can't.  One team reverse engineers the hardware and
> > creates a specifications document, the second team implements
> > (from scratch or from unencumbered FOSS sources) the firmware
> 
> The only "unencumbered FOSS sources" are public domain.
> Creating BSD code from GPL code is no different from creating
> GPL code from a binary blob. Without the clean-room approach,

By unencumbered I meant that you cannot use code (even if it's FOSS)
that may possible have been posted from questionable sources who may not
have observed cleanroom practices.  For example, if code from somebody
just showed up one day that emulated the radio IC on the 8388, you could
not use (or look at) that code for a cleanroom effort without being 100%
sure that the code in question was also cleanroomed.

Dan

> the GPL code authors would have an easier time proving that
> the BSD code is contaminated. It's not certain that they
> would succeed of course, just as it isn't certain that a
> binary blob vendor would succeed against a GPL firmware that
> was made without a clean-room approach. This is purely a matter
> of having a more solid defense if it can be shown that there
> was no access to the original.
> 
> Any Linux hackers want to sue *BSD hackers?  >:-)
> 
> (as always, this is not be be considered legal advice)