On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 10:58:42AM -0700, Magnus Feuer wrote:
There have been a few takers. I will follow up on them today.
One question about a VIA NDA: If we sign an NDA with VIA in order to obtain specs and developer docs, will we not be prohibited from releasing the finished LinuxBIOS port under GPL since the source would show the secrets covered by the NDA?
I _think_ an NDA is not a problem, it (usually?) only protects the datasheet itself (you may not give it to third parties), but not any code created with the help of the datasheet.
Please somebody correct me if I'm wrong.
I suggest you make it perfectly clear to VIA that you're going to use the datasheet to enhance a GPL'd project, and thus you will release your code under the terms of the GPL, too. If they _know_ this, and agree to it, there cannot be any problems.
(I personally don't like NDAs in general; it would be much nicer if all datasheets were publically available; but having datasheets under NDA and being able to release GPL'd code is much better than having no datasheets at all)
HTH, Uwe.