The ongoing Philips webcam driver saga [LWN.net]

The ongoing Philips webcam driver saga

Posted Jun 2, 2005 5:47 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
Parent article: The ongoing Philips webcam driver saga

The removed decompressor appeared to mostly consists of tables of arbitrary-looking numbers. I suspect that it going to be impossible to reverse-engineer in a clean-room fashion. Even if someone somehow succeeded, the result would be tables of similar numbers, open to unfounded accusations of copying. It seems to me Linux will never properly support this hardware unless Philips itself provides the code with GPL-compatible license, or at least a detailed description of the algorithm.

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The ongoing Philips webcam driver saga

Posted Jun 2, 2005 21:41 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

Are unfounded accusations of copying a problem?

In today's story, we see that Alan Cox thought the accusations were reasonable, and I don't think he would find unfounded accusations reasonable.

Assuming it's technically possible to do the reverse engineering, I'll bet it's possible to arrive at the same set of numbers in such a way as to convince Alan and his ilk that no copying took place. And that's enough for the code to survive.

The ongoing Philips webcam driver saga

Posted Jun 3, 2005 5:50 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

Are unfounded accusations of copying a problem?

They can be. It's called "FUD".

I hope you are right. But I think for that to happen more is needed than the finished code: The author of the clean-room version must be able to document how he independently arrived at the numbers.