RFC: Capability addition for IEEE 1588
Poul-Henning Kamp
phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Wed Oct 3 13:11:00 PDT 2007
In message <2a41acea0710031306p22d66379oc6575ad9ff5ea99d at mail.gmail.com>, "Jack Vogel" writes
:
>> When I talked to HP's licensing department, there were a $1k licensefee
>> for anything IEEE1588 related and their message was that even if
>> the FreeBSD foundation got such a license, the users would still
>> have to have one as well if they compiled the source code or some
>> such nonsense.
>
>What source code was being talked about? I'm not talking about
>anything userland, and my driver is just turning on a hardware
>feature, I can't imagine HP having anything to do with it, but I
>double check internally.
They seem to think they have a patent on doing things that way,
no matter what hardware or software you use.
If Intel chips have hw-support for timestamping, somebody at intel
must have thought about the patent thing.
But as I said, if that can be resolved, it should certainly go in.
--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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