Licensing wlc_phy_radio.h and brcm80211 (was: [PATCH 3/3] b43: N-PHY: add 2055 radio regs)

Rafał Miłecki zajec5 at gmail.com
Thu Oct 14 13:38:49 EDT 2010


2010/10/14 Greg KH <gregkh at suse.de>:
> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 07:06:00PM +0200, Rafał Miłecki wrote:
>> 2010/10/14 Greg KH <gregkh at suse.de>:
>> > On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 06:40:14PM +0200, Rafał Miłecki wrote:
>> >> W dniu 11 października 2010 18:24 użytkownik Gábor Stefanik
>> >> <netrolller.3d at gmail.com> napisał:
>> >> > Doesn't brcm80211 contain register names for B2055?
>> >>
>> >> I've checked brcm80211 and noticed defines in
>> >> drivers/staging/brcm80211/phy/wlc_phy_radio.h.
>> >>
>> >> Whole brcm80211 driver is licensed as:
>> >> MODULE_LICENSE("Dual BSD/GPL");
>> >>
>> >> Mentioned file contains following comments:
>> >> +/*
>> >> + * Copyright (c) 2010 Broadcom Corporation
>> >> + *
>> >> + * Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any
>> >> + * purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
>> >> + * copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
>> >>
>> >> Our b43 driver is licensed as:
>> >> MODULE_LICENSE("GPL");
>> >> and I am not sure if permission above is actually GPL-compatible. The
>> >> best option would be to add defines from wlc_phy_radio.h and include
>> >> Broadcom's copyright. However comment above wants us to include info
>> >> about free copying/modifying/using which is not GPL-compatible.
>> >>
>> >> Is there any way to solve this issue?
>> >
>> > I don't understand, are you just wanting to use the names in the .h file
>> > for the registers?
>>
>> Yes. I want to put lines like:
>> #define RADIO_2056_RX0                                (0x6 << 12)
>> in my radio_2056.h
>
> I don't think that bitfields are copyrightable :)

What about rest of the code? brcm80211 seems to support even newer
devices we don't even try to support in b43 yet.

Can I treat code as pure-GPL and do not care about that
maybe-not-GPL-compatible statement in header?


>> > If so, why?  You don't want to support the same devices in the b43
>> > driver that the brcm80211 driver does, do you?
>>
>> I do. I see many advantages of that plus most of the code is already
>> here coming from RE.
>
> "RE"?

Reverse-engineering. (Almost?) whole b43 was written using
clean-room-reverse-engineering. Code is based on specs from
http://bcm-v4.sipsolutions.net/ .


-- 
Rafał



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