On Mon, 2012-12-03 at 11:13 -0700, Tim Gardner wrote:Ben - what is your policy on extracting firmware from Windows drivers?
I suppose the policy should be that the driver's licence must allow
extracting and then distributing the result. Which I wouldn't expect
ever to be the case, in practice.
Your commit message refers to the Hauppuage driver package at
<http://steventoth.net/linux/hvr1800/HVR-12x0-14x0-17x0_1_25_25271_WHQL.zip>. I didn't find any licence text, other than 'All rights reserved', in either that or the currently distributed version of the same driver <http://www.wintvcd.co.uk/drivers/HVR-12x0-14x0-17x0-33x0-44x0_1_48_29272_SIGNED.zip>.
It seems like it ought to be OK, and they _are_ the same files that are
covered under the license in WHENCE.
I'm not sure how you can say they are the same files, as you're
proposing to change the contents. The copyright on the current files
belongs to the chipset vendor, Conexant, and Hauppuage *presumably* used
firmware supplied by Conexant, but either of them might have chosen a
different licence for the versions in this driver package.