Re: Copyright infringement in linux/drivers/usb/serial/keyspan*fw.h

[Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl>]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 03:31:45PM +1000, Sam Johnston wrote:
> 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.

We usually allow some time for license issues to be resolved.  In the
extreme case of KDE it was more than a year :)  Still, the bugreport
for this should stay open while the problem remains.

If you wish to encourage dialog with the vendor, then by all means
start dialoguing :-)  Nothing will happen unless someone steps up
to fix this, and the more voices the better, I think.

> > 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.

That's exactly a reason not to include the driver if it's not free.
By including it, we help make their hardware more popular, and we
don't want to do that unless the driver is free.

> in this particular case
> i'd much rather see said vendor release their code under a less restrictive
> license,

That's just about always preferable, but it's not always achievable.
Some hardware vendors can be amazingly hard-headed about this.

> 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.

I think this problem has been popping up here and there for years.
I don't see it getting any worse, but it doesn't seem to be getting
any better either.  (It might get worse fast if hardware vendors
start pushing closed platforms like copy-restricting hard disks, but
I doubt any geek would want one of those in the first place.)

Richard Braakman