Christer Weinigel wrote:
How about the licensing? I think the VSA BIOS freely available from NatSemi if one gets the XPressROM kit from them, but what does the GPL say about calling a binary object? In my mind there is no linking done if a GPL:ed application contains a binary blob which it uncompresses into memory and then jumps to an address within the blob, but people were quite anal retentive about GPL:ed applications using the Qt toolkit a few years ago, so there could be trouble.
There was a good write up about this in
http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT5041108431.html
Calling a binary isn't ideal, but until someone spends the time to reverse it, this is a way to go to get features working.
We see this all the time with Video BIOS for chipsets with integrated graphics and also certain other functions of chipsets. The vendors supply us with source under a tight NDA or just a binary and a script file with a utility to modify the binary without ever having to give us source.
Lets see, use a binary to get a product to market right away or spend weeks or months reversing code and having a product ready for market much later?
Bari