Hi I have just bought one of these terratec usb sticks (without looking at the list of supported devices first, my fault, I know) and I guess I'm unable to return it. Before I give it away for free or sell it at a much lower price, I wanted to ask a few things. Let me recapitulate the story as I understood it. Devin Heitmueller once worked on a driver implementation using official Micronas data-sheets and their reference implementation. The Micronas legal department then denied publication in a very late stage. Meanwhile, Markus Rechberger wrote his own user-space closed-source driver, but has now stopped distributing that and instead founded his own company Sundtek. Furthermore, parts of Micronas have been bought by Trident Microsystems. I hope I'm correct up to here. I also saw an estimate of the amount of work required to write a reverse engineered driver, it ranged around 50hrs. My question is, did the Micronas legal department intervene because the linux driver built on top of their reference implementation and they weren't willing to gpl that, or did they also oppose on using the data-sheets? If it was only the reference driver, wouldn't it be whorthwhile trying to again get the data sheets and build a driver based solely on these? I couldn't find any post that would clarify this. I would be willing to invest some time, play with the device and see if I can improve the situation, probably even if I really had to reverse engineer. However, I'm in no way an expert in v4l driver writing, so I don't know where this will lead to or if I'm going to brick the device on the very first occasion ;-) (btw: how easy is that, generally?) I know that the general advice is to dump these devices and buy something else, but as I said I'll have this hardware lying around anyway. So I'd like to know if I missed something, if there is any prior work (unaffected by the legal problems), or if I'm bound to fail because the task is just too big. Markus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-media" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
