kernel-libre (hopefully 100% Free) for Fedora 8 and rawhide

[Linus Walleij]

On Mon, 24 Mar 2008, Rahul Sundaram wrote:

> Alexandre Oliva already said this is not a matter of licensing compatibility 
> but just licensing (ie) the firmware inside the kernel doesn't have the 
> equivalent source code.

There is one fundamental problem here, when identifying "firmware lacking 
source code", and that is that certain firmware does *NOT* have source 
code.

I agree that for the large blobs for certain wireless controllers there is 
probably a source code somewhere, possibly for some Texas TMS320 processor 
or similar for which there is no free compiler, but anyway, so I agree on 
these things.

For some of the smaller blobs in SCSI controllers and graphics cards I 
seriously doubt there is any source code, having experienced first hand 
the development of such things at one or two occasions.

People writing such firmware with hex editors are actually quite common.

Then the question is more about releasing relevant programming information 
than source code, so we can make sense of the hex blobs and have fun with 
'em.

Perhaps this is reason enough to classify them as non-free anyway, so not 
much difference, but an important thing to be aware of nevertheless, 
before trying to push companies for non-existant source code, perhaps we 
should ask them for programming info instead, so we can add this to the 
file where the firmware is embedded and make a hex-by-hex disassembly of
the small blobs and thus make them amendable.

Linus