Re: kernel firmwares: GR proposal
Diverting to -legal.
Sven Luther wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 12:48:35AM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
>> Sven Luther wrote:
>> > Yeah, that is something which is needed. We need someone to go over
>> > larry's list, which i have copiedto the debian wiki, and find out who
>> > the copyright holder of those problematic firmwares are, and then we
>> > can contact them, taking the broadcom original letter i wrote as a
>> > sample.
>>
>> How optimistic you are. :-) After four or five attempts to find a
>> contact address at Broadcom which would reply, I gave up; I'm glad
>> someone else found one eventually.
>
> Actually, it was quite easy, i just wrote the linux driver support page,
Hell, I did the same thing earlier.
> and got a reply,
....but didn't get a reply. Which is why I was so impressed....
> it was fully CCed to debian-kernel, so you can look how i
> did it.
Hmm, maybe I will. Perhaps you used the "magic words" and I didn't. Let's
try to figure out what the magic words are.... Or maybe it was simply
a result of getting a *second* mail saying the same thing.
> The reply was quite fast, altough the driver folk needed some time to
> escalate it to the right people, and then find their legal team reply, it
> took a couple of month or so. Compare that to all those who where shouting
> that it was stupid, only lost time, and that broadcom, with their
> anti-linux stance would never reply and stuff, so i have reasons to be
> quite optimistic.
:-)
> The arsenic case was more problematic, since the copyright seems to have
> landed at broadcom too, but they don't care since they don't sell it
> anymore,
Given this, we actually should have a decent chance of getting them to
license it under a free software license (after all, what do they care
about it?) provided we can talk to the right people.
> and they probably are not even aware of the fact that they are
> actually copyright holders.
FYI, there is a way to deal with a copyright of unknown ownership.
Get a license from everyone who *might* have the copyright. Of the
form "*If* Broadcom holds any copyrights in this code, and we don't know
whether we do, *then* Broadcom licenses its copyrights under license X.
Broadcom does not license any copyrights which it does not hold as of
<date>."
Repeat with all other companies which might have some of the rights. Once
you've gone through all of them, you have a proper license, even though you
don't know who holds the copyright.
This is essentially similar to getting "quitclaims" for contested land.
> I had a similar problem with some ocaml library, which was developed
> together byt the ocaml team and the digital labs, which ended up at HP,
> and even asking bdale about it, did not help free that code, which is now
> lost forever and upstream reimplemented it.
At least we actually have the source for the acenic code, even though we
don't have a free license for it.
> I think the quote from bdale
> was "i think i know in which set of boxes it may possibly be".
>
>> I think that throwing Debian's name around with 'offical' status may
>> be helpful to get responses from some of these companies; I didn't do
>> that, since I couldn't!
>
> Well, assuredly, but i think that another difference may have been the
> more reasonable and well though-out mail with some legal analysis, and the
> fact that what we demanded was quite easy for them to do. Also, the
> timeline was maybe one of more maturity and sensibility on this subject,
> and we had a rather huge thread on LKML when it happened. From your past
> posts on the subject, i believe that maybe the wordings you chose where
> not the best ones, but as i have not seen said mails ...
Probably not the best words. I was very polite to them, since I really
figured it was just an honest mistake (which it was), but I probably came
across as an "unimportant nobody" and they figured it wasn't worth wasting
their time.
> Friendly,
>
> Sven Luther
--
Nathanael Nerode <neroden@fastmail.fm>
Bush admitted to violating FISA and said he was proud of it.
So why isn't he in prison yet?...
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