[Lcdproc] VLSYS L.I.S 2005 Driver written

[Peter Marschall]

Hi Daryl,

On Saturday, 24. March 2007 20:05, Daryl F wrote:
>   I wrote a driver for the L.I.S 2005 (not the L.I.S 2) by tracing the
> USB traffic on a WinXP system with VLSystem's (vlsys.co.kr) driver and
> application running. I've inquired with them if I can release the driver
> to open source but have received no response.
>   Can I release this driver for lcdproc without their permission? Does
> it break copyright law to trace a datastream and write a driver without
> decompiling or disassembling their programs?

First of all: I am not a lawyer, so this is no legal advice.

If you only looked at the data stream transferred over USB,
found what it does and then wrote an LCDproc driver without
looking (disassembling, ....) at the original drivers,
then it looks pretty much like what the Samba team is doing
with the SMB protocol.

Maybe they can help you with your question.

In any case it does not matter whether you release this driver
"for lcdproc" or "for" any other purposes: you are the one
who may get under fire first should they consider the driver
illegally created.
When the driver gets included in LCdproc and they take legal action,
LCDproc (and the ones who added the driver to LCDproc - me) may
also be affected.

So, I'd rather stay on safe ground and will currently not include 
the driver.

Could you ask VLSystem a 2nd time?
Maybe they react this time.

For curiosity's sake:
How did you snoop the data off the USB wire?

Regards
Peter


-- 
Peter Marschall
peter@adpm.de