Re: APEX and Debian
On Sat, Jul 29, 2006 at 12:34:10AM +0200, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> * Kevin Price <KevinP@web.de> [2006-07-29 00:20]:
> > What makes you think the drivers are non-free? Isn't the ethernet
> > driver GPL?
>
> Yes, the Ethernet driver itself has always been GPL but it uses an
> "access library" which was not open source in the past. This has
> recently been changed (to the BSD license) so now someome just needs
> to re-write the driver in a way that it can go into the mainline
> kernel. Fortuntely, someone is doing just that and has made lots of
> progress already.
>
> The other problem is that the driver needs a binary blob, which is not
> only non-free but cannot even be distributed in the "non-free" section
> of Debian. However, again, we might be lucky because the
> firmware/boot loader (RedBoot) of the NSLU2 has Ethernet support so
> the blob is in flash (or RAM, after running RedBoot) already. It
> looks like the Linux driver might be able to use that.
I believe we can assume that once the boot loader loads the firmware,
it doesn't need to be reloaded by the kernel.
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