Re: non-free firmware in kernel modules, aggregation and unclear copyright notice.

[Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>]

On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 11:11 +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 09:49:25AM +0100, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > I don't think you did get a rejection, a few people said that _they_
> > weren't going to do it, but if you want to then go ahead. I think people
> > are just fed up of people bringing up the issue and then failing to do
> > anything about it -- so prove them wrong ;-)
> 
> Actually patches to add firmware loader support to tg3 got rejected.

I think they will be accepted if they first introduce a transition
period where tg3 will do request_firmware() and only use the built-in
firmware if that fails. Second step is to make the built-in firmware a
config option and then later on when the infrastructure matures for
firmware loading/providing firmware it can be removed from the driver
entirely.

One of the sticking points will be how people get the firmware; I can
see the point of a kernel-distributable-firmware project related to the
kernel (say on kernel.org) which would provide a nice collection of
distributable firmwares (and is appropriately licensed). Without such
joint infrastructure things will always be a mess and in that context I
can see the point of the driver authors not immediately wanting to
switch exclusively. Simply because they'll get swamped with email about
how the driver doesn't work...