Fedora Freedom and linux-libre

[Les Mikesell]

David Woodhouse wrote:
> 
>> As the rest of the sentence continues to say "then this License, and its 
>> terms, do not apply to those sections" I think you are one being 
>> misleading here.  There is some room for disagreement on the 
>> separateness but not about whether aggregations are permitted when those 
>> specified conditions are met.
>>
>> Here's the whole thing in context since you seem to be incapable of 
>> finding it in the thousands of COPYING files you must have:
>>
>> "If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, 
>> and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in 
>> themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those 
>> sections when you distribute them as separate works."
> 
> That part is a simple statement of copyright law. as a prelude to what
> comes next. As it says, the GPL doesn't even _apply_ to those parts when
> you distribute them separately. How could it? The GPL only operates by
> giving you back permissions which copyright law took from you -- and the
> GPL _cannot_ apply to those parts, when you distribute them as separate
> works.
> 
> But you seem to have 'accidentally' cut out the next sentence of the
> same paragraph:

No, if you meet the criteria above, the rest is irrelevant.

> Or are you trying to make the incredible claim that in fact, the
> firmware embedded somewhere in a bzImage file -- where we can't even
> find it to extract it -- _is_ being distributed as a separate work,
> rather than as a part of a whole which is based on the kernel?

It doesn't say _you_ have to be able to extract it. In the context of a 
computer program, I can only interpret the terms "identifiable sections" 
and "separate" in terms of the computer's handling of the sections, and 
I have no doubt that the data sections where these chunks of data are 
stored are identifiable (or the devices wouldn't work) and they are 
separate things from the kernel program code or even data used in 
calculations.  The fact that they are temporarily compressed into some 
particular format or other should not affect the copyright status of the 
parts any more than printing something in the same font or on the same 
page as something else would make them the same thing.

> If so, you would have to be _very_ deluded.

I'd admit there's room for interpretation here, but so far you haven't 
made much of an argument other than proximity for why firmware would be 
part of "the Program", or what attributes you think are required to 
establish separateness.

> That's almost as silly as
> the 'but we _like_ to use hex editors on our kernel, so we _are_
> providing it in the preferred form for modification' defence. :)

If it's silly, then you shouldn't have any problem showing where it is 
executed as part of "the Program", or defining exactly why it isn't a 
separate section, or perhaps why proximity matters.  But you haven't 
done any of that yet.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com