On Sat, Apr 17, 2004 at 08:16:36PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > On Sad, 2004-04-17 at 19:40, Ryan Underwood wrote: > > Of course, if the legal advice you refer to was specifically aimed at > > the firmware scenario, where you have a blob of who-knows-what that does > > not execute on the host embedded into a driver binary, then I'm not one > > to argue with that. > > It was specifically in response to the question about firmware, and > whether it would be better if firmware was seperated. I don't know > of any direct case law on embedding firmware and at what point it > isn't "mere aggregation"
So your advisor is saying that such a work is undistributable under the GPL, or are they saying that it is not distributable at all? I'm also curious if they would draw the same conclusion if you had some form of interpretable bytecode that is embedded into the binary. It doesn't run on any CPU, but nevertheless is classified software by most definitions since it executes in a virtual machine. You might say then that the bytecode is not the preferred form of modification according to the GPL, but if I wrote an interpreter and no other tools to go with it, it has no other form in which it can be modified. This is borderline pedantry, but boundary cases must be considered if we are to make wise decisions. I don't think any of this really addresses the DFSG though. Some Debian folks are removing firmware which is freely distributable and not being combined/aggregated with GPL drivers, on the basis that it is software and thus must be DFSG-free according to the social contract. One requirement to be DFSG-free is that source must be made available, so these firmware don't satisfy it and are removed. My opinion is that this only makes sense when the target is known to be a general purpose computer and the firmware image is known to contain a program that is executed by its CPU. Otherwise, it could simply be a configuration list that is parsed by the device, or a memory initialization image, or a dispatch table, or something similar, and rejecting such things on the basis that they are *suspected* to be software without source seems to be counterproductive. -- Ryan Underwood, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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