Diverting to -legal. Sven Luther wrote: > On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 12:48:35AM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote: >> Sven Luther wrote: >> > Yeah, that is something which is needed. We need someone to go over >> > larry's list, which i have copiedto the debian wiki, and find out who >> > the copyright holder of those problematic firmwares are, and then we >> > can contact them, taking the broadcom original letter i wrote as a >> > sample. >> >> How optimistic you are. :-) After four or five attempts to find a >> contact address at Broadcom which would reply, I gave up; I'm glad >> someone else found one eventually. > > Actually, it was quite easy, i just wrote the linux driver support page, Hell, I did the same thing earlier.
> and got a reply, ....but didn't get a reply. Which is why I was so impressed.... > it was fully CCed to debian-kernel, so you can look how i > did it. Hmm, maybe I will. Perhaps you used the "magic words" and I didn't. Let's try to figure out what the magic words are.... Or maybe it was simply a result of getting a *second* mail saying the same thing. > The reply was quite fast, altough the driver folk needed some time to > escalate it to the right people, and then find their legal team reply, it > took a couple of month or so. Compare that to all those who where shouting > that it was stupid, only lost time, and that broadcom, with their > anti-linux stance would never reply and stuff, so i have reasons to be > quite optimistic. :-) > The arsenic case was more problematic, since the copyright seems to have > landed at broadcom too, but they don't care since they don't sell it > anymore, Given this, we actually should have a decent chance of getting them to license it under a free software license (after all, what do they care about it?) provided we can talk to the right people. > and they probably are not even aware of the fact that they are > actually copyright holders. FYI, there is a way to deal with a copyright of unknown ownership. Get a license from everyone who *might* have the copyright. Of the form "*If* Broadcom holds any copyrights in this code, and we don't know whether we do, *then* Broadcom licenses its copyrights under license X. Broadcom does not license any copyrights which it does not hold as of <date>." Repeat with all other companies which might have some of the rights. Once you've gone through all of them, you have a proper license, even though you don't know who holds the copyright. This is essentially similar to getting "quitclaims" for contested land. > I had a similar problem with some ocaml library, which was developed > together byt the ocaml team and the digital labs, which ended up at HP, > and even asking bdale about it, did not help free that code, which is now > lost forever and upstream reimplemented it. At least we actually have the source for the acenic code, even though we don't have a free license for it. > I think the quote from bdale > was "i think i know in which set of boxes it may possibly be". > >> I think that throwing Debian's name around with 'offical' status may >> be helpful to get responses from some of these companies; I didn't do >> that, since I couldn't! > > Well, assuredly, but i think that another difference may have been the > more reasonable and well though-out mail with some legal analysis, and the > fact that what we demanded was quite easy for them to do. Also, the > timeline was maybe one of more maturity and sensibility on this subject, > and we had a rather huge thread on LKML when it happened. From your past > posts on the subject, i believe that maybe the wordings you chose where > not the best ones, but as i have not seen said mails ... Probably not the best words. I was very polite to them, since I really figured it was just an honest mistake (which it was), but I probably came across as an "unimportant nobody" and they figured it wasn't worth wasting their time. > Friendly, > > Sven Luther -- Nathanael Nerode <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Bush admitted to violating FISA and said he was proud of it. So why isn't he in prison yet?... -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]