National Semiconductor Geode GX1 ?

[Bari Ari]

Christer Weinigel wrote:

>How about the licensing?  I think the VSA BIOS freely available from
>NatSemi if one gets the XPressROM kit from them, but what does the GPL
>say about calling a binary object?  In my mind there is no linking
>done if a GPL:ed application contains a binary blob which it
>uncompresses into memory and then jumps to an address within the blob,
>but people were quite anal retentive about GPL:ed applications using
>the Qt toolkit a few years ago, so there could be trouble.
>
>  
>
There was a good write up about this in

http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT5041108431.html

Calling a binary isn't ideal, but until someone spends the time to 
reverse it, this is a way to go to get features working.

We see this all the time with Video BIOS for chipsets with integrated 
graphics and also certain other functions of chipsets. The vendors 
supply us with source under a tight NDA or just a binary and a script 
file with a utility to modify the binary without ever having to give us 
source.

Lets see, use a binary to get a product to market right away or spend 
weeks or months reversing code and having a product ready for market 
much later?

Bari