statement:
http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?p=585102
Dear MastaTabs & Ratte,
The fact that many Mediator drivers are available for downloads at our website has nothing to do with their commercial status. In the archive enclosing our Radeon.card driver there is a disclaimer which clearly informs that our driver is a commercial software and is copyrighted.
As in the code of the OpenPCI Radeon.card driver there are many, many big fragments of code copied/stolen 1:1 from our driver the OpenPCI driver is illegal and as such should be immediately removed from every places.
It is completely unimportant if you sell this illegal software or you give it away for free. Our Radeon.card driver was written for Mediators and no one contacted us for licensing its code to any other hardware solution.
Imagine what would happen to you if you do the same with any software which works with Apple computers only. If you copy big fragments of Apple copyrighted code, remove protection (which join the code with Apple computers hardware) and you distribute such code for free for users of any PC computers...
Your suggestions that we based the Radeon initialization code on the Linux source is completely wrong. This code was written by Pawel Stypula long time before ATI released the AtomBIOS parser source code. The first working version of the code for initialization the Radeon gfx card we have had in November 2004. This code was firstly working on the Radeon 9250 AGP card installed in the Dragon 1200 busboard. We still have the sources of our earliest versions of the Radeon.card.The Radeon initialization procedures we based on the reverse engineering of x86 BIOSes of the Radeon cards - it was really hard work.
From the beginning the code of our Radeon.card driver has been written in the 68k/Coldfire assembler. Not a single line of this code is written in C+.
As in the OpenPCI Radeon.card driver the main part of initialization procedure (the whole AtomBIOS parser) is the exact copy byte-by-byte (over 600 assembler lines of code) taken from our driver do not lie that you based it on any other source than our driver. This code is simply stolen as many, many other parts from our driver code.
Our Radeon.card driver surely includes the parts of code of Voodoo.card driver as a framework. The parts of our Voodoo.card driver, which was the first (released in November 2000) driver for Voodoo3 gfx cards working with the P96 gfx system.
Please remove immediately your illegal driver from any downloads.
Best regards,
Darek Smietana
ELBOX COMPUTER
