I demand that Georg Acher may or may not have written...
On Sun, Jul 01, 2007 at 12:33:39PM +0200, Clemens Kirchgatterer wrote:
[snip]
Until now, there's AFAIK no legal decision that you are not allowed to include binary only modules in the kernel. If it gets that far, we will put in user space. No real gain, but if it helps...
As things stand, ISTM that if you distribute, you'll be in clear licence-violation territory in the view of at least some of the copyright holders.
The usual practical "anti-binary" arguments for a PC platform (new mainboard requires new kernel) don't count here, it's an embedded system. You can't simply switch the kernel anyway, as it has many additions for the V4L-stuff.
what if i wan't to put additional faetures into the card? what if i want to fix a bug in the firmware? benefit from performance improvments in later kernel releases?
IMO a theoretical question. This is not file server. It's a video decoding card.
That doesn't matter. It's still Linux-based and you still need to release the modified sources (I'd say enough to allow the building of a complete filesystem image for the device).
And anyway, I think that the kernel-upgrade and bug-fix points are valid... and it'd probably help if you get as many of your changes upstream as you reasonably can (if you haven't already started on this). For a start, that's likely to make it easier for *you* to switch to a newer kernel :-)
Most of the important stuff is done in the (closed) co-processors anyway. If you want it to be a file server, you don't need the HDMI output.
No argument there.
[snip]