On Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 08:14:52PM +0100, Michael Paesold wrote:
> >On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 07:46 -0700, Ky Srinivasan wrote:
> >>I may be wrong here; but I think windows drivers cannot be open-sourced.
> >>I recall reading that in windows DDK documentation.
>
> I don't believe the problem is with Windows drivers, but with the Windows
> Driver Development Kit. The DDK has a license incompatible with the GPL. I
> think writing a driver without the kit would still be possible, although
> difficult because it would require much more knowledge about the Windows
> kernel.
>
> Remarks: no facts, but just what I read on mailing lists.
I remember reading something of that effect. However, I think that was
only for GPL, and that BSD was accepted, but that may be because you can
distribute binary-only BSD code.
After reading the license [1], I'm more confused. Section 3 seems to be
the only thing limiting redistribution of generated code. And it seems
only to apply to drivers based on sample code (section 2) and WQHL
certified drivers.
But I'm no lawyer or native english speaker, so I'm probably wrong.
Being that the case, there must be some information about drivers in
windows. Well, there's NdisWrapper, and it can be used to infer how to
write a network driver. Mingw includes some ddk headers, but I don't
know if anything else is still missing.
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/ddk/ServerSP1DDKEULA.mspx
[2] http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/
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