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Comment by steve_austin | Hacker News Reader

It seems like a grey area. Especially given that the driver is a mash-up of sample code from a third-party hardware SDK and a Microsoft book, would Kodak/Pakon really care?

I would think the only part of the software that still might retain trade secrets would be the color management code, and that's not in the driver.

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Maybe there's a way to distribute dissembler hints and patches where you need the original driver files to get the source code. I assume the MS code has a reasonable license since it was published as sample code

> trade secrets would be the color management code

Are trade secrets even protected? If there's a patent, yes, but that's expired. The implementation is protected by copyright, but the know-how isn't.

Kodak sold a lot of their patents to other companies as a result, IIRC, of their bankruptcy. I'd have to look at the patents for this particular system again, because I can't remember if they were ever reassigned or if they were simply allowed to expire.

I don't think reassignment changes the duration of the patent. Looks like the early versions of the devices came out in 2004, so it's getting really close to when they'd expire.

IANAL, but my concern would be distributing either the original drivers or 64-bit drivers, but in practice, no one is going to care. It's not worth an hour of a lawyer's time to send a cease and desist letter for distributing driver source for an 18-year-old device.

Trade secrets may not be protected by patents (if expired), but protection of them is a potential motivation for copyright litigation.

> Maybe there's a way to distribute dissembler hints

Tavis recently posted about using STABS for that <https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/symbols.html> and has existing code that seems relevant: https://github.com/taviso/wpunix/blob/main/debug/idb2stabs.p...

I've never used Ghidra in anger to know if it would work for their platform, nor whether the Ghidra database can be shipped separate from the binary

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