The Fear is Paralyzing (Translated)

(translated from http://blog.shemesh.biz/?p=743 , with permission)

A few days ago a customer who needed GPL-related advising. Of course I'm not going to mention the name of the customer, the type of product or the details of the issue, but, in general terms, I can explain what their situation is.

The company (let's call it "Yehuda Moving Ltd." or "Yehuda" for short), sells a hardware product. The product, like every product these days, has firmware that's stored on internal flash memory. It connects to the computer via USB and is operated by a driver Yehuda wrote for Windows. Someone reverse engineered the driver and wrote a driver for the Linux kernel for the hardware. As far as I can understand, this driver is part of the vanilla kernel.

Yehuda decided to write fixes for the free driver (bugfixes, things that weren't understood right during the reverse engineering process, etc.) so that the Linux driver will be better. This is where their problem is. The company is completely willing to release the fixes they made to the driver under the GPL (in fact, they prefer that), but they don't want the license to apply to their firmware.

From a legal and practical standpoint, it's clear that what the company wants to do is so deep in the real of the allowed that the question is almost nonexistent. Because the firmware wasn't written to communicate with Linux but with Windows, and becasue the Linux driver wasn't even written by them, it's pretty clear that nobody has a reason to complain to them. Moreover, because everything they are doing there is basically to improve a GPL program, nobody with an interest will complain to them.

Still, it's interesting to see how the perception about the width of the net that the GPL casts is preventing companies from releasing things. It seems we need, either actively or by letting information propogate, to show these companiess that we won't hurt them just because they decide to be part of the community.

A point for thought,

Sachar.