Thursday, January 15, 2009

Getting GPL driver code released from an employer.

Submitted by John Sokol Wednesday January 14, @01:26PM to Slashdot

For an embedded ARM project at work, I wrote a USB Gadget UDC driver (USB Device controller) for the Philips ISP1582 USB 2.0 device controller chip. This chip is not currently supported in Linux but is used in many PDA's since it's inexpensive. There is a real need for this driver in the community. It took me several months of long nights and weekends of coding. Much of it is derived from the drivers/usb/gadget/pxa27x_udc.c driver and other bits and pieces of GPL code. How can I push my employer to do what they are legally and morally required to do? To release this code open source so it can find it's way in to the Kernel. As am employee I am legal and contractually bound, so I can't just take the code and share it. To make matters worse I am laid off come the end of this month so I am under some time pressure to push for the release of this code. Does anyone have some experience with this? Is there some good boiler plate letter with enough legalese that I can use to put pressure on management here?

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