[LinuxBIOS] Potential copyright issues with decompiling ACPI tables?

[Josiah England]

On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 15:23 -0600, Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 28 Jul 2005, Ken Fuchs wrote:
> 
> > I haven't spend much time working with ACPI tables, but there may be
> > copyright issues with decompiling these on a COTS BIOS and using the
> > result in LinuxBIOS.  Does anyone agree there may be a copyright
> > concern here?  I don't think there is, but I'm not a copyright lawyer.
> 
> that's a good question. we don't know. On the one hand, ACPI describes 
> hardware, and the OSes read it all the time. Seems like public info. 
> 
> OTOH, there's a copyright notice in there. 
> 
> I don't know the answer.
> 
> ron
> 
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Since there's a copyright notice in it, we would be safer off by
duplicating that copyright notice if at all possible and putting it in
our code.
Since there is no (direct) financial gain from us not selling the
software, there is little chance of repercussions.

Josiah