On Sat, Aug 05, 2006 at 02:22:18AM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote: > On Aug 04, Goswin von Brederlow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > >>think not? Prove it by proposing a GR. More importantly, the release > > >>team > > > I had such a plan, but no time to implement it currently. > > How do you handle the fact that it is a license violation making the > > thing illegal to distribute? > I see that the lawyers of SuSE and Red Hat do not believe this to be > true or at least do not consider it a problem, and this is enough for > me to ignore the opinion of the debian-legal@ armchair lawyers.
This position was clear enough that broadcom and the other company holding the qlsomething firmware copyright, changed their licencing after sa lengthy lawyer consulting process. The real issue here is one of freedom and DFSG and not one of legality anyway. Those firmware are not DFSG-free and have nothing to do in main, and this is the real problem. We may (or not) distribute some of them in non-free, even though they are not clearly distributible, but that is the choice of the ftp-masters, and seeing how miboot was refused to go into non-free, because it holded a half-sector of m68k code without a clear licencing case (not withstanding that it is decades old, and every macos <10 had tools to create such floppies and distribute them), i doubt it would be consistent to keep it like that. As for non-distributability, it is moot, since those firmware don't need to be GPL compatibly, since they are just non-free stuff shipped inside the kernel media. But then there may be another license violation mentioned here. Friendly, Sven Luther -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]