gpl issues, where to post?
Sanford Rockowitz
rockowitz at minsoft.com
Sat Nov 21 03:35:57 PST 2015
First, let me apologize in advance for a posting that's not really on
topic for this list. Googling has been unhelpful, so I'm hoping that
someone here will at least recognize the issues I need to address and
point me in the right direction.
I've written a program for querying and updating a monitor's settings
using DDC. (Think of it as a replacement for the no longer maintained
ddccontrol.) I'd like to publish it as an open source project,
preferably GPLv2. Most Linux video device drivers (radeon, nouveau,
nvidia proprietary, intel, ...) expose an I2C interface (/dev/i2c), and
if present I use that interface to communicate with the monitor. No
(legal) problems there. AMD's proprietary fglrx driver, however, does
not expose an I2C interface. Instead, its API has functions for
accessing the needed services. So what to do if the user is running
fglrx, not radeaon? At run time, the program dynamically tries to load
the fglrx api library, and if found uses it to communicate with the
monitor. I don't think that poses any legal issues. What I don't
understand is how to handle the source code. Currently, copies of the
fglrx api headers exist in my source tree. Do I need to pull them
out? In that case the build would have to be changed to point to
external copies of the header files, and only compile the AMD related
portion of the program if the header files are present.
Thank you for any hints you can provide by pointing me in the right
direction, whether mailing lists, sites, people, or examples of source
code that addresses similar issues.
Sanford
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