On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 08:04:13AM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote: > Has anyone asked Linus what his feelings are regarding firmware? If he > thinks it's acceptable (or possibly even the 'preferred form of > modification') to have in Linux and that it's not violating the GPL then > I don't think we have a problem. In these cases of ambiguity it makes > sense to me to ask the copyright holder to clarify for us instead of > assuming that they're violating their own license.
I concur with the other responses: Linus is not the sole copyright holder. I'll also reiterate the other problem: even if we believe that the entire Linux kernel developer body agrees (which may be the case, though I doubt it), I'm sure there's a lot of code in the kernel pulled from other GPL projects, whose copyright holders aren't kernel developers at all. -- Glenn Maynard