Fedora Freedom and linux-libre

David Woodhouse dwmw2 at infradead.org
Sun Jun 15 23:24:31 UTC 2008


On Sun, 2008-06-15 at 20:12 -0300, jeff wrote:
> But tg3.o as distributed by RedHat/Fedora when it's compiled is *NOT* a GPL .o, 
> it has the proprietary data in it. It isn't separate at all (like some 
> firmware, say intel wireless, which is a completely separate file).
> 
> I look at tg3.c and I can't tell where this "aggregation" begins and ends. It's 
> the *SAME FILE*. Can you clearly say which line numbers are GPL and which line 
> numbers are not GPL?

It is quite clearly a violation of the GPL.

Feel free to submit a patch to shift the firmware out of that file and
fix the driver to use request_firmware() for it. I'm collecting such
patches in the git tree I referred to earlier.

For now, we're shifting firmware blobs into the firmware/ directory and
still letting people include them into their kernel image.

But I strongly believe that's _still_ a GPL violation, because they are
still being distributed 'as part of a whole which is a work based on the
Program', rather than 'as separate works'. With all that that implies.

So in the long run, we actually want to move the whole lot out of the
firmware/ directory of the kernel source and into an entirely separate
package. But we'll do things one step at a time; let's get the drivers
fixed to use request_firmware() first, and then we can worry about the
details of how that firmware gets shipped.

-- 
dwmw2




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