They're afraid of reverse enginneering, i.e. in a company somewhere in =
the
intractable Far East (China, say) somebody looks at the driver's source
code, has an immediate "ah, so that's how they do it" insight, proceeds=
to
burn that into an ASIC or whatever, slightly modify your driver so as t=
o
spew out bogus company information, and hey, they're in business. (Are =
you
seriously thinking about proecuting a (mainland) Chinese company for
copyright infringement?)
In most cases, this argument is bullshit. However, there are a few
legitimate cases. The insanity of interfacing a tape drive to a paralle=
l
port via a floppy controller may be such a case -- after all, all compo=
nent
parts are well-understood and -documented and reading commented source =
code
to a driver may offer significant clues about the internal design of th=
e
interface in question. (As opposed to, say, a nondisclosure for graphic=
s
adapters.)
Personally, I'd say "buy a SCSI tape and forget about that nonsense". (=
Ditto
for IDE hard disks.) If everybody would have done that, low-performanc=
e
SCSI adapters would cost at most $20, and SCSI tapes would be roughly a=
s
expensive as these QIC-80 beasts are now.
--=20
Nothing would please the Kremlin more than to have the people of this
country choose a second rate president.
-- Richard M. Nixon
--=20
Matthias Urlichs \ Noris Network GmbH i.Gr/ Xlink-POP N=FCrnberg=
=20
Schleiermacherstra=DFe 12 \ Linux+Internet / EMail: urlichs@nor=
is.de
90491 N=FCrnberg (Germany) \ Consulting+Programming+Networking+etc'i=
ng
PGP: 1B 89 E2 1C 43 EA 80 44 15 D2 29 CF C6 C7 E0 DE=20
Click <A HREF=3D"http://smurf.noris.de/~smurf/finger">here</A>. =
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