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HACKING: Clarify the intent of the license

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Bastien Nocera 2019-08-05 13:32:06 +02:00
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HACKING.md
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@ -6,6 +6,27 @@ Although the library uses GLib internally, libfprint is designed to provide
a completely neutral interface to its application users. So, the public
APIs should never return GLib data types.
## License clarification
Although this library's license could allow for shims that hook up into
proprietary blobs to add driver support for some unsupported devices, the
intent of the original authors, and of current maintainers of the library,
was for this license to allow _integration into_ proprietary stacks, not
_integration of_ proprietary code in the library.
As such, no code to integrate proprietary drivers will be accepted in libfprint
upstream. Proprietary drivers would make it impossible to debug problems in
libfprint, as we wouldn't know what the proprietary driver does behind the
library's back. The closed source nature of drivers is usually used to hide
parts of the hardware setup, such as encryption keys, or protocols, in order
to protect the hardware's integrity. Unfortunately, this is only [security through
obscurity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity).
We however encourage potential contributors to take advantage of libfprint's
source availability to create such shims to make it easier to reverse-engineer
proprietary drivers in order to create new free software drivers, to the extent
permitted by local laws.
## Two-faced-ness
Like any decent library, this one is designed to provide a stable and