On Wednesday 2008 December 10 16:10:16 Celejar wrote: >On Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:05:26 -0600 > >"Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <bss03@volumehost.net> wrote: >> On Wednesday 2008 December 10 15:15:56 lee wrote: >> >what's the difference between a standard kernel and a kernel that >> >comes as a Debian package? >> >> The Debian kernel has some non-free (as in: source not available) parts >> removed. There are also Debian-specific patches added. > >The vanilla kernel has non-free stuff in it? I thought it's all GPL. Different interpretations of the GPLv2, I suppose. Linus seems fine with binary blobs -- basically machine codes -- that are uploaded to devices as part of initialization. The kernel never directly runs such code. The "source" as far as Linus is concerned is the data itself, similar to the way a image might be it's own source. [1] Debian focuses more on the mutability of the code, and the intent of the GPL that "source code" means the "preferred form for making modifications". It's been too long since I read the GPLv2 to see how explicit that is, but the GPLv3 did make that much more clear. It's unlikely that this machine code, is developed directly in hex (or octal, or whatever numerical format). It's more likely compiled using a specialized compiler (maybe C, maybe a toy language) or, at least, some sort of symbolic assembler. Even if it is just symbolic assembly, it would be preferred over the raw machine code for studying and (possibly) modifying. Anyway, that's why Debian sometimes removes features from the vanilla kernel -- the considered (voted on, IIRC) opinion that those parts do not follow the DFSG. [1] A lot of images aren't their own source. Gimp, Krita, Karbon, Inkscape, Photoshop, etc. use a format that is better for editing (the source) even if they also save to more traditional image formats like GIF, PNG, and JPEG. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss03@volumehost.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.org/ \_/
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