Hey,

> Code or any portion thereof.
> 
> If you view APSL source code, learn something from a line of code,
> modify that line of code to work with the code you have, in order to
> make your code work, you have taken Original Code, as defined in 1.7 to
> be any part "suitable for modification," and added it to 1.6b, thereby
> requiring that the Larger Works, as defined in 1.5, fulfill the
> requirements in 4.


I'm not a legal person and I only superficially followed the discussion.
I think the problem lies in the thin line between "modification" of the
covered code and code written from scratch that uses knowledge gained
from the covered code.

A first naive reading of apple's license tells me that I cannot simply
copy&paste a driver formt here, slap it into netbsd, modify some
variables here and there to make it work. This is what linux made with
unix code (sco trial).. you can discover pieces where the comments to
the code are the same, including typos.
Now looking at the code to reverse-engineer the hardware and then
rewrite the driver from scratch is different. I think it is not directly
covered byt the license you pasted.
What is difficult is to probably prove the difference among the two in
less extreme cases. Think about some "reasonably simple code" that
everyone would implement that way given the knowledge of the device. YOu
look at the code, understand the device and will write some code that is
remarkably similar to the original code. And now? HOw can you prove you
have not just copied it? Probably this position is not very strong.
The problem of course arise sby the fact that you gain knowledge of
something that is without documentation except for the protected code
you are looking at...

-R