Device drivers and non-disclosure agreements

Posted Oct 12, 2006 13:44 UTC (Thu) by grahammm (guest, #773)
In reply to: Device drivers and non-disclosure agreements by smitty_one_each
Parent article: Device drivers and non-disclosure agreements

Hardware (or rather the interface to it) does not have to be proprietary. Take UARTS for example. There are a vast number of UARTs, whether discrete or emulated in FGPA etc, or even the interfaces to GSM etc modules, which use the register interface originally used by the NatSemi 8250 - often with the 16550 FIFO extensions. Similarly up to and including VGA, the register interface to video cards was standard across manufacturers.