Re: licence problem with ADSL modem drivers.
On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 09:20:22AM +0200, Sven LUTHER wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 12, 2002 at 11:11:50AM -0700, Walter Landry wrote:
> > Sven LUTHER <luther@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr> wrote:
> > > Hello, ...
> > >
> > > I was thinking about doing a package for the Bewan ADSL PCI st modem,
> > > but have some questions relating to the licence problems, and to how
> > > (and if) we can distribute this package.
> > >
> > > Bewan (www.bewan.com or www.bewan.fr) does distribute linux drivers in
> > > source format, but without any kind of licence agreement, so i contacted
> > > them, and after discution with them, i found out the following :
> > >
> > > The modem is a kind of 'software' modem, having some part physical,
> > > and some part done by software. The driver is composed of linux code
> > > written by Bewan, and a binary only library whose licencing they do
> > > not control, and for which STmicroelectronics does not release
> > > sources. They are willing to rebuild for other arches than just ia32
> > > though. This may well change in the future though, but for now it is
> > > like that.
> >
> > This sounds like the body of Bewan's code + STmicroelectronics code is
> > just a driver, just like NVidia graphics card drivers. Assuming it is
> > really just a driver, then Bewan can license the code however they
> > want, as long as it is compatible with the STmicroelectronics code.
> > That should probably be BSD or GPL+exception. In that case, Debian
> > can distribute it in non-free.
>
> Yes, it is, but it is different in a way from nvidia's drivers, i guess,
> since we don't have sources for the STM proprietary part. And as it is
> distributed, it will only be available for i386, we need to ask them to
> get the stuff built for other arches.
>
The situation is the same with the nvidia drivers.
If you look inside nvidia-kernel-src_*.deb, it is a bunch of
scripts to download and build NVIDIA_kernel-*.tar.gz.
NVIDIA_kernel-*.tar.gz in turn consists of a handful of small .c
and .h files and a huge binary object to which we don't have
source.
Note that the double step of not including the contents of
NVIDIA_kernel-*.tar.gz in nvidia-kernel-src_*.deb is specific to
the nvidia license situation and should not be needed in your
case.
Friendly too
Jakob
(IANAL, TINLA, IANADD)
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