Now that lenny is out, it's time for an update on this. I wrote: > No word from Sun re Cassini. Still no word, I've tried contacting Simon Phipps now. > There is a FreeBSD driver for the Kawasaki USB network chips (kaweth > driver) under 4-clause BSD but the stated copyright holder for the > firmware is the driver author, which is not correct. I will try > contacting him. Bill Paul wrote: > First, look here: > > http://www.freebsd.org/~wpaul/KLSI > > These are all of the files that I originally received from Kawasaki LSI > when I first contacted them about writing a driver, as I originally > received them. This includes the file containing the firmwre image. I > was never given any firmware source. You will note that there are no > copyright headers at all, and when I spoke to the Kawasaki representative > on the phone the subject of copyright on the firmware image never came up. I wrote: > No news from Tehuti, but I found firmware in OpenBSD under 4-clause BSD. Pinchas Ziv (CEO of Tehuti) wrote: > We are satisfied with the last statement: > > " Permission is hereby granted for the distribution of this firmware data > in hexadecimal or equivalent format, provided this copyright notice is > accompanying it." I wrote: > WhiteHEAT hardware is still avalable so there may be some mileage in > contacting the manufacturer. I talked back and forth with them and they seemed to be happy to fix the license text but I never got a final statement of what exactly it would be. I think we should move ahead with removal of sourceless firmware, but include everything we have clear permission to distribute in the non-free section. This would exclude the 3 blobs mentioned above and several others that are already stripped from Debian kernels. I propose that future versions of firmware-nonfree, or a second firmware "source" package, should be based on the firmware directory of Linux releases, using a script to exclude the files with unclear license status. The contents of the firmware directory should be excluded from the linux-2.6 package except where source is available. Of the 13 sourceless firmware blobs I was aware of in the lenny kernel, several have subsequently been moved to the firmware directory: - 2.6.27: dabusb, dsp56k (with source), kaweth, whiteheat - 2.6.28: cassini - 2.6.29: e100, starfire - linux-next: qla1280 The remaining firmware - found in mga, r128, radeon, tehuti, typhoon - is at least clearly redistributable. Before I spend (and possibly waste) time in preparing packages, I'd like to get people's opinions on this proposal. Ben.
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