Re: [PATCH] Enable writing to ATA devices, fix several bugs

[Marco Gerards]

Pavel Roskin <address@hidden> writes:

> On Sun, 2008-07-20 at 20:55 +0200, Marco Gerards wrote:
>> Pavel Roskin <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> > I know.  That's why I'll write it from specifications or maybe I'll
>> > take it from the GNU/Hurd code.
>> 
>> Taking it from Specifications will be better.
>> 
>> I think the ATA driver of GNU Mach comes from Linux 2.0 or so.  So
>> that won't change anything for us ;(.
>
> I don't think choosing consistent names could be interpreted as a
> copyright violation (except by companies like SCO, but then all bets are
> off).

No, you are right.  But it means that you have a look at the Linux ATA
code.  If you copy Linux names into our code, people could claim that
we looked at Linux and based our code on it.

> Anyway, if I ever have a chance to touch the GRUB ATA code again, I'll
> use FreeBSD as a reference.  Using specification is probably not the
> best idea because we need GRUB to work on the real life hardware, and we
> need to be prepared to handle known quirks in popular hardware.

We were talking about not looking at copyrighted code as a
reference...  But looking at FreeBSD would be better than looking at
Linux if we want to avoid possible copyright problems.

--
Marco