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Re: ecos - linux driver questions


On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 04:13:05PM +0200, Bob Koninckx wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 16:02, Gary D. Thomas wrote:
> > On Tue, 2003-05-06 at 09:47, Florian Mume wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > > 
> > > I'm a student of electrical engineering and quite a newby in the great ecos
> > > world. I'm working on an Atmel AT91 custom board and got ecos already
> > > running :-)
> > > Could somebody please let me know, if there is a possibility to get a
> > > Wireless LAN PCMCIA card (perferable Orinoco) working in an Arm environment?
> > > If so, how complicated would it be?
> > > Is it in general possible to "port" a driver from Linux to eCos?
> > > 
> > 
> > In theory, writing a network driver for eCos is pretty straight
> > forward.  The problem comes in the details, and these wireless
> > cards abound in them.  
> > 
> > You may be able to take ideas and inspiration from Linux drivers,
> > but sadly you can't copy code since the licenses are not compatible.
> 
> Does this also apply to a student doing some project work that will
> never leave the lab of his university ? I can understand how the GPL
> prevents the integration of linux code into the ecos tree but not how it
> could prevent an individual to use linux code into his private project.

One simple answer is that since the eCos 2.0 license is "GPL compatible"
(see the official gnu.org site for that and my earlier comments on that),
you are certainly allowed to mix eCos 2.0 licensed code and GPL. 

The only consequence is that the mix has to redistributed under normal GPL,
which will enforce you to also GPL the "application". So for this 
"student project" that would probably pose no problem at all.

Peter


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