Matthew Garrett wrote: > Florian Weimer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> * Nathanael Nerode: >>> Until they do one of these two things, the firmware is not safe to >>> distribute. >> >> Of course it is safe to distribute. What do you fear? That Broadcom >> might sue you for distributing something that they have written and >> released under the GPL, and actually have a case?
Yes. They would have an excellent case. They didn't grant explicit permission to distribute without source. I don't have source, so I'd better not distribute. If I were defending myself, I'd have to claim that they'd granted implicit permission, and I don't think I'd have better than a 50-50 chance of winning; see below. >> They might as well >> sue Debian because the toolchain supports the SB-1 architecture. > > Indeed. It's obviously the intention of the licensor to provide code > that can be distributed. Maybe it's obvious to you. It's certainly not obvious to me. In actual fact, Broadcom released the firmware code under a license which does not grant permission to redistribute. (It requires source but the source is not provided; see Thomas Bushnell's message which summarizes the situation at http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/10/msg00705.html .) To me, this means that Broadcom didn't know what the hell it was doing. I cannot divine Broadcom's actual intentions from that, and Broadcom can easily and convincingly claim that it intended something different from what you assume. If Broadcom (or some irresponsible successor company; think SCO) decided to sue for copyright infringement, they could claim that they had never intended to allow people in general to redistribute the firmware without source -- that it was just for them to distribute, and perhaps for kernel.org as well -- that any further distribution was inadvertent -- and they would actually have a pretty good case, as far as I can tell. (Of course, if you get an actual legal opinion from a copyright lawyer saying differently, I will of course concede, since IANAL.) Now, if Broadcom could be contacted, and they said, "Oh, we meant to allow anyone to redistribute the hex/binary blobs without further source code," that would be different. Then it would be safe to distribute with a copy of that statement. I have not been able to get such a clarification from Broadcom, and I have tried. If you can get such a clarification, more power to you. -- This space intentionally left blank.