[Fedora-legal-list] Linux firmware

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Apr 29, 2009, "Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 04/29/2009 03:04 AM, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> Which of the two should be taken out so that the other can be
>> redistributable?  Perhaps the latter, given that it's a driver under a
>> license that's not even compatible with GPLv2?

> It depends on whether you consider firmware as software, and currently,
> in Fedora, we do not.

You can't change what a copyright holder meant in its license by
twisting the meanings of the words it chose to fit what you want them to
mean.  That's not how copyright works.

The copyright holder didn't permit the combination of the second piece
of code (which, being driver code rather than firmware, is software even
under your standards) with the other “derived from proprietary
unpublished source code” (does anyone use “source code” for anything
other than software, or is this enough of a give-away?)

> Please don't start this up again, I have minimal patience for the same
> tired arguments again and again.

That you're trying to turn this into the same old argument doesn't make
it so.  It's a different issue.  This has nothing to do with mere
aggregation of firmware here, or with whether firmware is software or
not.

This is about (i) combining two pieces of works of authorship in a way
that doesn't comply with the licenses provided by the copyright holder,
none of which are under the GPL, and (ii) combining *driver* (rather
than firmware) code that's under GPL-incompatible terms with the GPLed
code in the rest of the kernel.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva, freedom fighter    http://FSFLA.org/~lxoliva/
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Gandhi
Be Free! -- http://FSFLA.org/   FSF Latin America board member
Free Software Evangelist      Red Hat Brazil Compiler Engineer