Bruno Wolff III wrote:
On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 09:06:25 -0800,
Suresh Govindachar <sgovindachar(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
>Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>>On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 15:10:24 +0000,
>> Suresh Govindachar <sgovindachar(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> But why such an indirect approach when Broadcom supports
>>> Linux on:
>>>
http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php (such
>>> support has existed since October 2008.)
>>
>>Because they don't let people redistribute their firmware.
>
> They do; that's why they have the linux_sta.php page linked
> above.
That's not what I said. That page is Broadcom distributing
the firmware. They don't let other people do it (at least
not without signing a contract).
Not so; I have read their licence.txt -- have you? The
licence.txt is in simple English (not leaglease) -- it allows
distribution of the firmware.
Hence it can't be in Fedora.
My original question was why use the indirect approach of
fwcutter rather than the direct approach of using the stuff
provided by Broadcom. The question was _not_ about why
Broadcom's firmware is not distributed in Fedora.
I think the reason why Broadcom's firmware is not in Fedora is
because Broadcom does not provide (VHDL, Verilog or whatever)
source code for the firmware, and
Fedora.org wants source code
for everything in it distributes.
They don't typically seem to enforce that, as router distros
have been doing that for a long time. But that doesn't mean
that it is right or wise to do so.
Fedora will include firmware that is freely redistributable
(even if it is restricted to being unmodified) in order to
have functional hardware support.