On 5/15/23 10:00, ryan wrote:
Hey there, I hope this email finds you well. I am writing to report a potential SOF license violation.
A person by the name CoolStar (aka starplayer132 and coolstarorg) is a developer in the custom Chromebook modding scene who creates drivers for Chromebooks running Windows 10/11. They sell SOF drivers for $10. However, when the driver is decompiled/deobfuscated using a reverse engineering program called Ghidra, the strings in the binary are identical to the ones in the Linux driver.
Here is a function from the Linux driver found in the Windows one:
The issue is that this SOF-based driver is closed source and, most importantly, paid, which completely violates the GPL license the original driver is using. Only about 15% of this code is their own property if you exclude the DRM inserted to paywall users from a simple audio driver.
The SOF driver is dual licensed GPL or BSD3c and hence reuse in this example is permitted under the BSD3c license.
See below the header for the sound/soc/sof/intel/hda-dsp.c file mentioned above:
// SPDX-License-Identifier: (GPL-2.0-only OR BSD-3-Clause) // // This file is provided under a dual BSD/GPLv2 license. When using or // redistributing this file, you may do so under either license. // // Copyright(c) 2018 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.
Regards, -Pierre