Re: [debian-knoppix] Re: Drivers
Klaus Knopper wrote:
On Sat, Nov 06, 2004 at 05:53:16AM +0000, Niall Walsh wrote:
Agreed, but apart from the "political/philosophical" problem with proprietary
drivers, there are some technical issues:
- With proprietary drivers, you can't easily fix security issues on your own.
You can't even be sure about (accidentially, intentional) backdoors.
- The way these "semi-proprietary" license of some drivers works, it is easy
for the vendors to just CHANGE the license, not only in future, but also in
the current versions. Imagine you have to inform thousands of Knoppix users
that their CD just got illegal because of a third party license change.
(( Note: IANAL))
Without discouting your other issues, I don't think it's very
likely unless the proprietary licenses reserve the right for the
licensors to change the terms at will. Otherwise the same thing
could happen with OSI licenses.
Also: Copyright is the right to copy, so once a person has
a copy of the distribution there's really nothing that the
copyright owners can do about it anyways. The absolute worst
they could do would be to force removal before further
distribution (and I don't think they could even do that).
Besides: If it were possible to do this, GLP and OSI licensors
could, in thory, do the same thing.
Of course, IANAL, and I'm more up on common law (british system)
than the various laws in Europe, but the basic provision is
estoppel -- which is that if someone knowingly leads you to believe
something in good faith and take action on that belief, they can't
go jerking you around by pulling the rug out from under you.
(this is a bit different from negotiating ambiguities where
nobody ever explicitly resolves th ambiguities because of
an implicit unwillingness to even go there).
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