As you received the info from another source before signing an NDA, this
normally means, that you can use that material within the conditions
the material itself, or any accompanying EMail sets.
Other policy would probably not be considered valid.
It would be like sending someone a packet with the label "free", and if
he accepts it, sending a letter that requests payment.
> I'm not particularly worried about transmitting the stuff to anybody who
> is interested, however SOMEBODY inside of PIE may lose their job because
> they sent out the document before the parasite^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlegal
> advisors got their hands on it.
Yeah. To keep good relationships, it would be better to try to convince
them not to require the NDA. There are strong arguments on your side:
1. SANE works on far over a dozen different architectures. You can't
make binaries for all of them.
2. SANE is a GPL package. It would be rather hard for you to make
anything for it, if you may not release source.
3. NDAing the protocol is not a good way to protect the interests
of the company. If the protocol is a secret, there is something
seriously wrong with the understanding of what makes a scanner a
good scanner. This is determined by the mechanics, the electronics
and maybe the software. But not by the protocol.
If you need an example to explain that to some salesperson/lawyer:
What makes e.g. a car a good one might be the quality of the engine,
the front-panels, etc, but _not_ the _color_ of the _wires_ connecting
them.
> 3) If there is a heavy ND clause, does Sane need to have the source
> code.
In principle yes. However you can write a backend without using an
existing one. This should be free from GPL restrictions.
The fact, that a GPL program would load and execute a non-GPL
library very probably can't pose a problem.
> 4) Other scanners are supported and these must have either been reverse
> engineered or the manufacturers have had some form of input, what is the
> general method used when say dealing with Umax or HP, do they ask for
> NDA's ?
HP was AFAIK quite nice and sent docs freely. Most others were either
reverse engineered, or someone from the more technical branch of the
company came up with info.
CU, Andy
-- = Andreas Beck | Email : <andreas.beck@ggi-project.org> =
-- Source code, list archive, and docs: http://www.mostang.com/sane/ To unsubscribe: echo unsubscribe sane-devel | mail majordomo@mostang.com