[duskwuff]

Clean-room reverse engineering doesn't require that. If someone were to read the existing drivers and write documentation explaining how the hardware appears to work, that documentation would be unencumbered, and a freely licensed driver could be written based on that documentation. The only methodology that would be questionable would be a developer writing a new driver while referring directly to the vendor driver.

To put it another way -- the IP protections on the current library are a matter of copyright law, and the protections are on the code itself. The facts of which bits do what -- which are embodied in that code -- are not protected (or protectable!), and can be reused freely.

[bear8642]

>The facts of which bits do what -- which are embodied in that code -- are not protected (or protectable!), and can be reused freely.

Though given Oracle's current legal proceedings that might change...