Referring to rpmfusion on Fedora project wiki?

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Mon Feb 23 20:41:55 UTC 2009


On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 11:22 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> The driver which started this discussion - Broadcom's proprietary driver
> for their wireless chipsets. It's implemented much like NVIDIA, it's a
> GPL-licensed wrapper around a binary blob with a
> proprietary-but-can-be-redistributed license.

Ah,, yes the same policy with regard to legally questionable material
would need to apply.  I've not seen a reference to an FSF (or other)
opinion that the broadcom driver situation is different than NVIDIA
with regard to potential GPL violation in how its distributed. Most
likely anyone who thinks the NVidia driver is not in violation, is
probably going to say the same of the Broadcom driver, and vice-versa.
  Because of this, the proprietary kernel modules as a group are
legally problematic in a way that something like applications like
Adobe flash player are not.  Insofar as there is a legal controversy,
it probably consistently applicable to the proprietary Broadcom and
NVidia drivers..unless someone can argue there is a technical or
licensing difference that I'm not aware of.

Of course this all comes down to..how do you enforce any sort of
policy in a wiki...its not exactly a fun job telling people they can
say things which are factually true..but legally problematic.

-jef




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