Re: DFSG violations in Lenny: Summarizing the choices
On Sat, 2008-11-08 at 14:11 -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
> There are corporate lawyers who are very much afraid that the FCC
> could, if they were alerted to the fact that someone had figured out
> how to reverse engineer the HAL and/or the firmware to cause their
> WiFi unit to become a "super radio" that could transmit on any
> frequency, that the FCC could prohibit the *hardware* from being sold
> anywhere in the US.
I've heard this claim before. Can you substantiate it in some way?
It seems to me that, if this is really true, then the hardware
manufacturers have been lying to the FCC for years, claiming that the
user cannot reprogram the card, without explaining that, in fact, it's
just that users may not know how to, but that they can do so without any
hardware mucking.
Regardless, the DFSG doesn't say anything about "unless the FCC has an
annoying rule". We don't distribute non-free software in Debian. And
that's not some sort of choice we might make--it's a a choice we have
already made.
Thomas
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