RE: Copyright infringement in linux/drivers/usb/serial/keyspan*fw.h
> Debian always follows the licenses, and that pedantic correctness is an
attractive factor for many of us.
I'm usually a big fan of pedantic correctness, and yes, in retrospect having
it in main is a cause for concern. My intention was to encourage dialog with
the vendor rather than immediately removing it, not necessarily to encourage
rampant tainting of the debian code base.
> If they don't want their hardware supported, that's their problem.
this is a bit of a catch 22... vendors support hardware the people use...
the people use hardware supported by the vendors. in this particular case
i'd much rather see said vendor release their code under a less restrictive
license, however if it's only available as a binary then we might be in
trouble. perhaps there needs to be some way of separating the firmware from
the offending module(s) so as the devices can still be supported without
needing recompilation (ie module reads from a file which is provided by a
non-free deb or something like that). devices with sane vendors work out of
the box, others need an extra package. the reason i talk about separating it
is that i suspect it is from a module that supports multiple devices, and
which could therefore have multiple bioses covered by different licenses.
> or using a distribution that doesn't care as much about licenses, like
Mandrake.
no thanks... i think i'll stick with debian. i'd like to see how this pans
out though because i'd say it's a problem that will become increasingly
common, and one that could be quite damaging. in a way it's similar to the
ongoing CSS discussions that have been stuffing my mailbox.
- samj
--
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"I don't care if Bill personally has my name and reads my email and
laughs at me. In fact, I'd be rather honored." - Joseph_Greg
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