source code question about confidential datasheet

source code question about confidential datasheet

[chou.o.ning]

Hi, eCos developers

I have porting eCos to some hardware board. As GPL license, I should
deliver source code to eCos community. The question is: the datasheet
of CPU is CONFIDENTIAL, and I need the registers description of
datasheet to write bsp codes to porting.(I did not using the codes
which provided by chip vendor)
If I deliver codes to open source, will I break the law of chip verdor?

Thanks!

Re: source code question about confidential datasheet

[Gary Thomas]

chou.o.ning wrote:
> Hi, eCos developers
> 
> I have porting eCos to some hardware board. As GPL license, I should
> deliver source code to eCos community. The question is: the datasheet
> of CPU is CONFIDENTIAL, and I need the registers description of
> datasheet to write bsp codes to porting.(I did not using the codes
> which provided by chip vendor)
> If I deliver codes to open source, will I break the law of chip verdor?

Firstly, in today's world, your vendor is being pretty silly :-(

I am not a lawyer (IANAL), so treat everything I say carefully.
If you are concerned, contact a good Intellectual Property lawyer
before you distribute anything.

I do think if you structure things carefully and don't name
anything so that it will expose the secrets, it will probably be
OK.

Secondly, the GPL only says that you need to distribute the source
code to those to whom you distribute the code (executable, etc).
Presumably those folks would have similar information available
to them as well, so there's no leaking there either.

Finally, in order to port eCos, you *need* to have a GCC port
(there's just too much in eCos that depends on some special
GCC support).  If this exists, how do they handle it since
they'd be dealing with the same sensitive information?

-- 
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Gary Thomas                 |  Consulting for the
MLB Associates              |    Embedded world
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