On May 22, 2008, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks! The Packaging Committee and kernel maintainers will have to
look into what's going on here. Although that doesn't address your
larger issue of binary firmware.
Indeed, it doesn't. I don't think there are very many of these
firmwares that are licensed in such obnoxious terms. But it's
certainly not the only example of this kind of problem.
The nouveau-drm patches that we're adding ourselves contain relatively
large chunks of "voodoo" [sic] code copied from non-Free drivers by
means of mmio dumps, but no copyright notices or licensing associated
specifically to those pieces of code. As much as I appreciate what
these folks are doing, I'm not sure this approach is ethical, let
alone legal. I don't know whether this has been run through legal,
but if it hasn't, I suggest that it be.
--
Alexandre Oliva
http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist oliva(a){lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
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