Re: UDI and Politics (was Re: Linux, UDI and SCO.)

Erik Corry (erik@arbat.com)
Sun, 20 Sep 1998 09:33:12 +0200


In article <360483B0.228FAF77@tbcnet.com> you wrote:
> will be distibributed as freeware for Linux, and the Project
> UDI members will be counting on the Linux community to work
> on device drivers.

That is curious. What do they think is in it for us?

Perhaps instead of a shim to allow UDI drivers to run
on Linux, they should be writing a shim to allow Linux
drivers to run under UDI.

> There is no way, no how for a GNU GPL UDI device driver to
> be used in a closed-source commercial OS.

I think you are wrong. UDI is intended to allow user-space
drivers if the kernel UDI implementation allows it.
This means a driver is basically an application on the OS,
using an OS API. This is a similar situation to the GPLled
ethernet drivers that BeOS AFAIK still uses.

I'm not sure what this means. I am also not sure whether
any of the big commercial OSs will have support for user-
space UDI drivers and how much the legal situation changes
if the driver is run in kernel space instead of user space.

-- 
Erik Corry erik@arbat.com           Ceterum censeo, Microsoftem esse delendam!

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