Some thoughts about firmware inclusion.

[Hans de Goede]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le Lun 22 octobre 2007 10:18, Peter Lemenkov a écrit :
>> 2007/10/22, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net>:
>>
>>>> Since we can include firmware for different devices into Fedora,
>>> can
>>>> we include win32-binaries for use together with Wine, DOS
>>> executables
>>>> for dosbox, jars for use with Java stacks , etc (if will be
>>> confirmed
>>>> that they works).
>>> These are executed on the main CPU so the answer is no
>> There is no such prohibition.
> 
> There is such a prohibition. The firmware-specific binary blobs
> licensing relaxing does not apply to the OP examples.
> 
> Every single example he made falls under general Fedora rules: must be
> built from source and use FLOSS license.
> 

I fully agree, this discussion does raise one interesting question though: What 
if there is fully floss software, which we can build from source. Which is 
written for another OS, but will run fine under an emulator and is hard to 
port. Do we allow shipping this?

(assuming someone first packages the needed cross toolchain to build this, 
which is something we may want to have independent of the answer to this question).

Regards,

Hans

p.s.

And no I do not have anything particular in mind, for now this is just a 
hypothetical question.