Sigh. I'm tired of the gross ignorance on this subject. Furthermore, there are different types of "firmwares." Most are not only GPL compatible "bundlings," but 100% redistributable and compatible with Fedora's guidelines too.
I deploy AMCC/3Ware true hardware RAID cards. 3Ware bundles firmware updates in its drivers. Before they did this, one had to boot DOS or Windows to update firmware. 3Ware's Escalade series was the first ATA RAID card to have a full GPL driver (in 2.2.15+). The Linux kernel doesn't use the firmware at all, it's for the on-board PPC400 of the hardware RAID card! So unless Fedora starts bundling a _full GCC _cross-compiler_ and related toolchain for a PPC4xx target (that'll add a few hundred MBs), one can_not_ build the firmware "from source" on a Fedora distro anyway! Same goes for many other "intelligent" firmware - even down to the on-board Intelligent Drive Electronics (IDE) of ATA/ATAPI devices (should hard drive/optical vendors ever start offering to bundle their firmware updates - especially for ATAPI DVD drives). After a few ARMs and other microcontrollers, you'd be talking a few GBs of toolchains! For those that disagree, are *YOU* going to maintain those? If not, who? Does Red Hat buy Montavista or TimeSys or some other company and basically _dedicate_ them to maintaining these toolchains? And who does the Q&A when the driver won't build because there's slight toolchain differences in various sev setups? Case-in-point: For those that are still against it, do you even _remotely_understand_ what I'm talking about? In not, don't try to say or otherwise promote what you think the FSF is saying. Don't bother to argue against what you don't understand. This issue is for kernel developers and their copyrights, companies and their hardware products, and countless other developers. Linus have repeatedly gone on record what is defined as a "derived work" of Linux as well as "bundled software" even outside of that. If the firmware works, unmodified, on another OS, it's not derived from Linux. If the firmware is not required for operation, then it's bundled. Hell, even the GPL has exceptions for basic hardware firmware. Otherwise the PC BIOS, Intel EFI and other components would have to be GPL. -- Bryan J Smith - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://thebs413.blogspot.com Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile -----Original Message----- From: Rahul Sundaram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2007 06:12:44 To:For discussions about marketing and expanding the Fedora user base <[email protected]> Cc:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Infinite Freedom??? Rodrigo Padula wrote: > We use the "Infinite Freedom" as slogan, we must follow the > recommendations of the FSF, > not including non free firmwares. Like I said FSF has endorsed several distributions which has such firmware in the kernel http://www.gnu.org/links/links.html#FreeGNULinuxDistributions We don't have any official slogans for Fedora either FYI. Our freedoms have always been finite. Rahul -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
