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Inprocomm and their module: msg#00013

law.gpl.violations.legal

Subject: Inprocomm and their module

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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