On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 10:57:01AM -0800, Greg KH wrote: > On Tue, Jan 05, 2010 at 11:55:49PM -0500, Vincent Launchbury wrote: > > Greg KH wrote: > > > And note, _I_ placed those images in the kernel image, after consulting > > > lawyers about this issue, so it's not like I don't know what I am > > > talking about here. > > > > I'm not questioning whether it's legal to distribute non-free firmware > > alongside the GPL. I'm merely saying that the firmware _is_ non-free, > > which should be reflected by the ebuild licenses. > > So you are saying that the license for the kernel should show the > license for all of the different firmware files as well?
If all the different firmware files get installed, then yes. > That would get > pretty unusable, and keep the kernel from being able to be installed on > anyone's machine that didn't want such licenses, right? > > Also note that the license of the firmware files do not matter to almost > everyone using the kernel, as almost no one uses those files anymore, > the ones in the linux-firmware package should be used instead. Right, which is why at the same time it would be useful to have an option to not install those files. There's no problem with USE conditionals in LICENSE; LICENSE="GPL-2 firmware? ( freedist )" or expanded further would be fine, and simply nuke those files on install with USE="-firmware". > So as we are a source-based distro, if you object to those firmware > licenses, just don't build them in your kernel builds. But to expect to > list all of them as the license for the whole kernel package, that's not > a workable solution as far as I can see. The kernel sources are unusual in that they install the sources, and the user is responsible for configuration and compilation. For anything built from an ebuild, the license of unused parts of the source code shouldn't matter, but here all of the source files of the kernel get installed. > > > So it's a pointless effort. > > > > To you maybe, but it's important to some. Note that updating the > > licenses would only affect those with strict ACCEPT_LICENSE settings > > anyway. I don't understand why you'd oppose the change. > > So you want anyone with such strict settings to not be able to install > the kernel package at all? If so, what kernel do you want them to be > able to use? :) The GPL-2 licensed parts of all the kernel packages -- so probably everything that matters -- could be installed with ACCEPT_LICENSE="GPL-2" with my above suggestion.
