The original pwc author raised some questions about the reverse
engineering of the decompressor algorithms used in the pwc driver.
Having done some detailed investigation it appears those concerns that
clean room policy was not followed are reasonable. I've also had a
friendly discussion with Philips to ask their view on this.
This removes the problem items of code which reduces the pwc
functionality in the kernel a little but leaves all the framework for
setup that will be needed for decompressors in user space (where they
eventually belong). This change set is designed to be the minimal risk
change set given that 2.6.12 is hopefully close to hand, with a view to
merging the much updated pwc code in 2.6.13 series kernels.
Someone else can then redo the decompressors properly (clean room) in
user space.
Note that while its easy to say that it should have been caught earlier,
but the violation was really only obvious to someone who had access to
both the proprietary source and the 'GPL' source.
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Alan Cox
Linus Torvalds