Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2000 09:43:24 +0100 (CET) From: marcov@stack.nl (Marco van de Voort) To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT Message-ID: <20001222084324.181F596EC@toad.stack.nl> In-Reply-To: <000901c06be9$00910570$aa240018@cx443070b> from Jeremiah Gowdy at "Dec 21, 2000 11:30:03 pm"
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[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. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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