Hi,
Firstly my apologies for only now popping up in relation to this thread - a
cofluence of job change with attendant email disruption and being focussed
elsewhere whilst getting on top of the new work situation... My thanks to
Paulus for pointing the discussion out.
I don't feel confident discussing the finer points of interpretation of the
license as it appears but can provide some background being the person who
got this particular body of work underway and discussed same with Keyspan,
Greg Kroah-Hartman, Randy Dunlap and others in early 2000.
As Paulus pointed out in his post, Keyspan's intent was to allow an open
source driver for their devices to be included in the Linux kernel.
Understandibly they wanted the copyright notice to afford them some degree
of protection against the firmware being misused where I would take misused
to mean something happening that would adversely affect their IP or
business, eg ensuring the firmware was only used with the hardware they
made. They were also concerned that the Copyright not infer that the source
code used to build the firmware itself would then become GPLd or more widely
available.
The copyright notice as it appears was derived from a sample I pulled out of
(from memory) one of the drivers made by FORE Systems Inc which also uses an
uploaded firmware sort of model. Keyspan made some changes to make it
consistant with their requirements but these were pretty minor I think.
I ran Keyspan's proposed wording by Greg in the first instance then Randy
double checked it with Linus when the first formal patch went in. Linus'
response was;
From: Linus Torvalds [mailto:NOSPAM]
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2000 4:20 PM
To: Randy Dunlap
Subject: Re: [patch] usb-serial new support for more keyspan devices
On Mon, 10 Jul 2000, Randy Dunlap wrote:
>
> Is there a problem with the license in some of these
> files? (2 examples below)
No. We've had binary-only firmware before. It's only if it runs on the
main computer that it has to be GPL..
Linus
-----
I took this to mean all was well and gave it no further thought...
If this is not the case I simply don't have the knowledge of law to make
such a determination but would consider it reasonable for Linus to be the
final arbiter in any case.
If we get stuck on it I'd be happy to take the concerns back to Keyspan and
see if a change could be made. My sense from the discussions thus far
however is that there is no need for this.
As an aside, I would add to this that Keyspan have been astonishingly
helpful - for example, when I met with them last year they asked if there
was anything _they_ could change in the firmware to make our job (of writing
a Linux driver) easier!
Again, apologies for entering the discussion so late in the piece.
Kind Regards,
Hugh
--
Hugh Blemings
mobile: +61 411 647 662 mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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