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Re: DFSG violations: non-free but no contrib



Le lundi 03 novembre 2008 à 13:33 +0100, Loïc Minier a écrit :
> On Mon, Nov 03, 2008, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> > Since SSL certificates are randomly generated data, they are not subject
> > to copyright law, so I don’t think they are in any grey area. We can
> > change them without any licensing issue, it’s just that they won’t
> > fulfill their job if we do.
> 
>  I'm not arguing about their copyright(-ability): just that we can't
>  usefully modify them; and still, the private key is the source to
>  create the certificate (even if it's random data), and we don't have it
>  in main.  The same goes with firmware: we might have the right to
>  distribute modified binary firmwares, and they are sufficiently useful
>  as they are, even without accompanying ultimate source.

Ah, firmwares without source but with a free (e.g. MIT) license are
another story. This is definitely a grey area, since I guess many
upstreams are working on the binary directly, but there are also some
who compile it from C sources or assembly. For some of them the tools
are available, for some of them they are in-house, for some of them the
tool is a hex editor. And I don’t think we can easily distinguish
between them.

Firmwares without a free license should go to non-free, regardless of
their format.

> > Firmware images are very different. They are binary code, only code not
> > meant for execution on the host CPU. They are similar to non-free data
> > for games: stuff that we cannot modify and with which we can live
> > without modifying, but it would be useful to be able to, and it is
> > impossible to distribute it in main.
> 
>  The non-free games data I know of is non-free because we may not modify
>  it because the license doesn't explicitely allow it; what specific
>  example did you have in mind?  This is IMO different from firmware
>  binaries which we may well be allowed to change, but don't have the
>  tools/doc to do so.

Yes, I didn’t understand you were talking about “free” firmware without
sources.

-- 
 .''`.
: :' :      We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code.
`. `'       We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to
  `-        our own. Resistance is futile.

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