Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2000 00:12:46 -0700 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: Marco van de Voort <marcov@stack.nl> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT Message-ID: <3A45A1EE.30138FDE@softweyr.com> References: <20001222084324.181F596EC@toad.stack.nl>
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Marco van de Voort wrote: > > [Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...] > > > Trouble is there is no consistency in the rulings. > > > > United States Code Title 17 Chapter 12 Section 1201 Subsection (f) > > > > My basic interpretation of this is, if you legally own a copy of the > > software (firmware is software), you can legally reverse engineer the > > software for the purpose of achiving interoperability. Therefore, if you > > own a piece of hardware, and you have no driver for the hardware, or the > > driver provided is not acceptable, you have the right to reverse engineer > > the firmware in order to write your own driver, thereby achiving > > interoperability. > > Exactly the same in Europe, only the sharing parts are new for me. > The difference seems to be: > The problem is that in the US, it is legal to override this with the > licensing conditions. In Europe this right is inalienable. No, it's not legal to override this with licensing conditions, but software companies keep trying to do so. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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