On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 14:54, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 06:03:16PM +0000, Jim Marhaus wrote: > > Traditionally people have erred on the side of caution in interpreting free > > licenses, following the wishes of the copyright holder and looking to the > > license's author for guidance. In this case the FSF indicates the binary > > firmware may violate the GPL. Kernel copyright holders also claim this, as > > well > > as some legally knowledgeable folks within Debian. Isn't Debian better > > served > > by removing the potentially infringing files than playing lawyer and trying > > to > > justify the infringement? > > You speak as if this has no negative effects. In fact, it does. > By removing, let's say, the tg3 driver, you make Debian unusable for a > large percentage of users. Those users turn to other distributions who, > strangely, have much better paid legal counsel than Debian.
Paid legal counsel doesn't mean better legal counsel. The FSF agrees with the position that the firmware needs to be removed; the FSF has probably the best legal counsel available regarding the GPL. > Surely if > anyone should be concerned, it's one with a half-billion dollar market > capitalisation rather than one with tens of thousands in its bank account
