[ILUG] GPL source code for embedded systems

[Niall]

On Sat, Mar 18, 2000 at 12:09:09AM +0000, Martin Donlon wrote:

> Hmm strange.....when companies like Matrox, 3dfx, Nvidia, Lucent,
> Rockwell, ATI, S3 etc...etc, don't release their specs everyone gets all
> upset. All these companies has industry secrets, just like Transmeta. If

I've no torch to carry for Transmeta, but I felt I had to jump in here.
These situations are not at all comparable. The refusal (and it wasn't a
refusal, but the specs were only available on terms not compatible with the
GPL) of the other companies mentioned to "release their specs" prevented
GPL writers from writing drivers for this hardware. No such problem exists
here, as Transmeta's chip is a CPU which will be integrated in mobile
devices where it will, apparently, emulate other processors. Even if a
Crusoe chip were put on some kind of add-on card, it wouldn't be necessary
to know its instruction set to write a driver for the card - only the
programming interfaces. To write a driver for a Rockwell based modem, you
don't need to know the instruction set for its DSP.



Kindest regards,


Niall  O Broin