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   (Think of it as a replacement for the no longer maintained 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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