Possibly offtopic : Binary only driver

[Arjan van de Ven]

On Sun, 2004-11-21 at 10:56 +0100, Stefan Sonnenberg-Carstens wrote:
> The problem I have now, that the driver needs to be
> rebuild with every new kernel version, which is released.
> Is there a way to avoid that ?
> I have developed kernel drivers for Linux for 2.2.x kernels,
> but things seem to have changed ....

Note that you really should talk to your lawyers about this; it's not
entirely clear if such non-GPL kernel components are legal or not
(personally I don't think they are).
For example, see the statements from Linus Torvalds on this at
http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/COPYING.modules .

I also wonder if the *driver* or the hardware has the "valuable IP" that
needs to be protected, most of the time it's the hardware after all.


Even if your lawyers think you're in the clear, it's a major pain. Well
that's actually an encouragement to make driver vendors consider if the
IP they try to protect really is worth the hassle... because  a hassle
it is. ABI and API change with every kernel release. And lots of people
run *lots* of different kernels, including kernels with really weird
patchkits.

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