[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: TG3 firmware report...



On Mon, 2004-10-11 at 09:06 -0400, sean finney wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 11, 2004 at 11:40:30AM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > Of course it is safe to distribute.  What do you fear?  That Broadcom
> > might sue you for distributing something that they have written and
> > released under the GPL, and actually have a case?  They might as well
> > sue Debian because the toolchain supports the SB-1 architecture.
> 
> they may have released it under the GPL, but there's a strong case for
> arguing that they're in violation of their own licensing terms for not
> providing the source code to the firmware blobs.  if they were in fact
> in violation of said terms, debian could not legally distribute the
> code.  or so the argument goes.
> 
You can't violate your own licensing terms.  A licence is what an author
gives to somebody to adjust the rights they have on a work.  The
licensee is bound by the licence, not the author.


(Note that this arguably doesn't apply where the author has taken back
patches under their own licence because they are in fact the licensee
not the author.)

Scott
-- 
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen?  Are you going round the twist?

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part


Reply to: