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From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.apps,comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.os.linux.x,comp.os.linux.hardware,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Why to not buy Matrox Millennium
Date: 28 Mar 1996 04:04:16 GMT
Organization: Utah Valley State College, Orem, Utah
Lines: 18
Message-ID: <4jd340$2f0@park.uvsc.edu>
References: <4j21ph$crr@slappy.cs.utexas.edu> <zhLWxIiCZ/IW083yn@cpcug.org>
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zetan@cpcug.org (David Lerner) wrote:
] This would be perfectly legal. Monitoring registers is a technique for
] reverse engineering that avoids the copyright issues. Of cours, the
] XFree Foundation may not wish to distribute code that is produced by
] sugh reverse engineering.
And they shouldn't. If they had done so for the Diamond cards,
then Diamond would not have published documentation. Drivers
created using this method are only "best guesses" about behaviour;
in particular, there are exception conditions which may not occur
while using their drivers that are rendered unhandleable.
Terry Lambert
terry@cs.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.