Plan for tomorrows (20080522) FESCO meeting

[Alexandre Oliva]

On May 22, 2008, Alan Cox <alan at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 02:18:22AM -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> kernel.  And, heck, this one doesn't even grant permission for
>> redistribution.  What are those Linux-no-libre guys thinking?

> Well we were thinking (and much legal advice seems to agree) that the firmware
> is a separate work.

This completely misses the point.  It doesn't matter if it's a
separate work or not.  The point is that software is being distributed
without permission to do so.  The arguments on whether redistributable
software can be combined with GPLed under the mere aggregation clause,
valid or not, mean nothing when the software isn't redistributable in
the first place.

> Like your BIOS for example.

There wasn't a copy of my BIOS in linux-2.6.25.tar.bz2 last time I
looked.  If there was, it might very well be a copyright violation,
depending, among other factors, on whether the BIOS grants permission
for redistribution.

> We had been gradually moving firmware to user space via request_firmware until
> various free software extremists made such idiots of themselves on the kernel
> list a couple of years ago everyone stopped because they were so p***ed off
> with them.

Which just goes to support my claim that it's very unlikely that the
changes that remove non-Free blobs from the kernel just won't be
accepted.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}