> is a luxury you may not be able to afford. (Since Alexandre mentioned
> Playstation: the PS2 has limited CPU resources, you probably want to
> squeeze all you can out of it. Its power comes from the other chips in it.
> Too many indirect calls on the main CPU in an effort to get around
> licensing issues could be a FPS killer on this platform.)
Okay, let's take a practical look at this.
Firstly, let's assume you have a very proprietry system, like the
Playstation 2. Actually, the PS2 is a very open system, as not only is
there an OFFICIAL linux port (with some closed sourced modules, ala the
LGPL) but there is a ton of detailed hardware information that comes
freely available with said linux port.
So the PS2 running Linux is not an issue. Those closed-sourced drivers are
considered 'part of the operating system', so making a port.c depend on
them to access proprietory OS and System components is totally allowed.
(eg, say you wanted to use the IOP chip to run wineserver code on it,
while allowing the main CPU to execute the x86 JIT emulation layer you
would need :).
Let's take a step away then. Let's say you were developing with the PS2
official, closed, devkit. Well, the devkit headers and librarys are of
course exempt from the license, as they are distributed as a normal part
of that OSes development platform.
So of course, the below statement really doesn't apply at all when
refering to proprietary hardware. Consoles always come equiped with the
same hardware, which is included as closed source with the compiler, and
thus exempt from the LGPL. If your proprietary hardware is some, say, MPEG
decoder... then you should have picked an operating system that doesn't
require low-level driver linking. And in fact, I can think of no
circumstance that would.
> > > There's another "excuse": proprietary hardware requiring custom core
> > > code under NDA (code that might go into, say, port.c). I've already
> > > mentioned my own hypothetical Xbox clone before, but TransGaming
> > > actually does wish to support some proprietary hardware in the
> > > future.
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