Advanced Card Systems ltd is the manufacturer of the smart card reader I bought last tuesday. They have an RPM for Fedora 7 (bit old, isn’t it?) which, when queried, says:
rpm -q -i -p ACR38UDriver-1.8.0-1.i386.rpm Name : ACR38UDriver Relocations: (not relocatable) Version : 1.8.0 Vendor: (none) Release : 1 Build Date: Sat 15 Sep 2007 06:25:45 AM CEST Install Date: (not installed) Build Host: localhost.localdomain Group : Smartcards/Driver Source RPM: ACR38UDriver-1.8.0-1.src.rpm Size : 105333 <strong>License: GPL</strong> Signature : (none) URL : http://www.acs.com.hk Summary : Driver for ACR38 PCSC in Fedora Core 7 Description : ACR38 PSSC Driver for Fedora Core 7. Compatible with MUSCLE API version 3.0.
So my understanding is that the driver is still GPL licensed. When asked about providing the source code, I received the following answer:
Hello Luca Botti,
Thanks for your email.
We do not release the source code for Linux version 1.8.0.
Please use those of version 1.7.9 for development.
Tks & B. Rgds,
xxxx
Account Manager
Mmh, smells like a licensing violation. I sent an email to FSF which properly directed me to GNU. I sent a recap to GNU organization, along with a polite mail to ACS. Hope to sort it out easily and friendly.
We’ll see…
On a side note, i re-checked and the smart-card reader in my Dell is rightly working with Fedora. Anyway, I am still interested in packaging the thing for F9.