On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 10:12:11AM -0700, Martin Lefkowitz wrote: > I was not aware of your work in the legal area. It sounds like you > are biting the hand that feeds you.
I am not biting the hand that feeds me, but I am biting companies who knowingly and willingly disrespect both copyright law and the ideals/goals/concepts of the very people who wrote the code that the respective companies use on/with their hardware (GNU/Linux). > If you succeed in getting companies afraid to be adding modules to a > kernel for fear of having to expose their detailed register layout to > the public either by documentation or code you will kill embedded > linux. I am not trying to make them afraid. I am merely reminding them of their obligations. Obligations to which they have voluntarily subjected themselves by agreeing to license the Linux kernel (and other software) under the GNU GPL. You cannot get the freedom of Linux, while taking that freedom away from others (your users). It's about equilibrium. To give and take. Mutual sustainable development. > Then you can buy your sticker "Long live BSD", or worse windows > (mobile). About which is nothing wrong at all! If vendors cannot cleanly comply with the GPL and copyright law (much of the derivative works issues are generic copyright law issues, not at all GPL related!), then they either have to change their products, or have to just go to *BSD or proprietary operating systems which allow their products (combination of driver hand hardware design choices) to work legally. I have no problem with this at all. "Linux adoption" is not a goal/end in itself. It's of no use to have a Linux kernel plastered with tons of proprietary code all over the place. Where would be the technical benefit of such a product? None at all. No way to fix bugs, no way to update your kernel, no way to decide if you can trust the code, etc. So my point of all of this is: Why do we have GPL licensed drivers or hardware documentation on some hardware at all? Why can e.g. Samsung afford to completely open the documentation to their mpeg4 hardware encoding/decoding engines in their later 24xx SoC's, while others think it is the most improtant business secret? Why can Marvell have a GPL licensed driver for AR6K? The design of your hardware determines what you have to reveal in the driver. So eventually, if you want to sell your product with drivers for a GPL licensed operating system, you might actually consider this whilst doing the hardware design. Just look at all the mess with AR5k just due to the fact that regulatory requirements are enforced in software rather than hardware. By using hardware that implements those things in it's own hardware/firmware, you can avoid any problems with free sofrware drivers down the road. -- - Harald Welte <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://openmoko.org/ ============================================================================ Software for the world's first truly open Free Software mobile phone _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
