On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 12:50 +0100, Mark Brown wrote: > On Mon, Oct 23, 2006 at 11:26:47AM +0100, Alex Hudson wrote: > > And it's not like he's the only one. But there are only a couple of > > developers taking action over the GPL, and usually over the grossest > > infringement (e.g., distribution without source). > > There's also things like EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL, kernel tainting when > proprietary modules are loaded and an advertised (and regularly used) > lack of stability in internal kernel APIs.
I would say all those things are driven mostly by technical concerns rather than legal ones necessarily, and that in general they do not impact those who are writing non-free drivers, nor do they constitute "action" per se. For example, a number of companies have made a case for a consistent API if not ABI, and that has generally been rejected on the grounds of freedom to code, not freedom of code (which I think is a concise description of the difference between open source-thinking people and free software-thinking people). > Requiring signed binaries is exactly what TiVo are doing. Ok, I didn't know that. I think, though, that the rest of the points stand - primarily that requiring signed binaries doesn't seem to me to be a terribly common tactic, even though it would be relatively simple (and is already pretty common on other platforms, like w32, esp. in areas such as driver development). Cheers, Alex. _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
