Re: non-free firmware

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2006 at 12:34:30PM -0500, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> Sven Luther wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 11:52:20AM +0100, Andreas Barth wrote:
> >> * Sven Luther (sven.luther@wanadoo.fr) [060108 11:12]:
> >> > There where two fully independent issues here :
> >> > 
> >> >   1) some (many) of those firmware using modules had a sloppy licencing
> >> >   situation, which meant the compiled kernels where indeed
> >> >   non-distributable.
> >> > 
> >> >   2) those firmware blurbs come without source, and are thus non-free.
> >> > 
> >> > We where working to solve 1), since without that, it was not even
> >> > possible to distribute these non-free firmwares from even non-free. I
> >> > think once this is solved the plan was to :
> >> > 
> >> >   1) either make those drivers be able to load the firmware from an
> >> >   external file, which we could then include in the initramfs from a
> >> >   non-free source.
> 
> For instance, now that the tg3 firmware is under a distributable license,
> with my tg3 patch reinstituted the firmware for specialized tg3 cards would
> simply be three files which go in a specific place in the directory tree
> and are picked up by hotplug/udev.

If we are going to do this, we obviously need to find out a strong framework
how this is supposed to work, and all need to follow the same schema.

I heard rumors about your patch being too disruptive, and was thus rejected by
davem, we don't want that to happen.

Friendly,

Sven Luther