Hi debian-legal, ... It seems the firmware kernel issue has reached a deadpoint, as there is some widely different interpretation of the meaning of the GPL over sourceless code.
For some background, the kernel/firmware wiki page includes both a proposed GR, the draft position statement by the kernel team, as well as an analysis of how we stand : http://wiki.debian.org/KernelFirmwareLicensing. But this is beside the point. The real problem is that there are a certain amount of firmware in the kernel, embedded in the drivers, which have no license notice whatsoever, and as thus fall implicitly under the common GPL license of the linux kernel. The audit from Larry lists some 40+ such firmware blobs. There is some claims that some of those blobs represent just register dumps, but even then one could argue that the hex blobs doesn't in any way represent the prefered form of modification, but rather some kind of register name/number and value pair. So, the RMs are making claims that those sourceless GPLed drivers don't cause any kind of distribution problem, while i strongly believe that the GPL clause saying that all the distribution rights under the GPL are lost if you cannot abide by all points, including the requirement for sources. Since i am seen as not trusthy to analyze such problems, i think to deblock this situation, it would be best to have a statement from debian-legal to back those claims (or to claim i am wrong in the above). Friendly, Sven Luther -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]