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Inprocomm and their module: msg#00013law.gpl.violations.legal
Hi all, I've been trying to get some information about my Inprocomm IPN2220 wireless card and I've stumbled upon D-Link's GPL source tarball for it's DI-624M device. It is available from D-Link's and from gpl-devices.org ftp sites. The latter leads me to belive that something has been worked out with the drivers for Linux for said card. The files in linux-2.4.x/drivers/net/wireless/inpro2220 in the tarball are a Makefile, some header files and a binary MIPS file. The output from file is: IPN2220: ELF 32-bit MSB MIPS-I relocatable, MIPS, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped and upon disassembly I can see that it's actually a Linux module-ish file. It does contain some Linux functions as .extern references, although it itself doesn't seem to have module entry/exit functions (from what I've seen up to now). The headers are under a propietary lincense, and _use_ of these files is prohibited except if you have a license agreement with inprocomm. This has become quite hard recently, as the company doesn't seem to exist anymore. The website went down early 2005 and its domain (inprocomm.com.tw) stopped resolving some time later. The Makefile references some .o files which should get linked with the binary blob in order to make the driver, though neither those files ore their corresponding sources are available. Should their driver be available under the GPL, it being a derivative work (I think) of the Linux kernel? What can be done now that the company (apparently) ceased to exist? How far am I allowed to reverse-engineer this binary blob under current EU regulations? I'd like to create an Open Source driver for it, but I can't be sure I'm allowed to even look at those header files and/or the binary blob for me to base it on. (please CC me, as I'm not subscribed) cmn -- Carlos Martin http://www.cmartin.tk |
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