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

Re: non-free firmware in kernel modules, aggregation and unclear copyright notice.



Raul Miller wrote:

On Apr 04, Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
is waiting for NEW processing, but i also believe that the dubious
copyright assignement will not allow the ftp-masters to let it pass
into the archive, since it *IS* a GPL violation, and thus i am doing
this in order to solve that problem.

On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 09:47:50PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:
Sure, and I suppose that the SuSE and Red Hat lawyers who are allowing
them to distribute this "violation" are all morons, right?

That's an irrelevant question:

The linux kernel is big and complicated enough that the presence of any
non-immediate problem tells us little about anyone.
If those lawyers have specifically read this part of the code and
realized
that the GPL notices on these bits of code are invalid they've probably
adopted a "wait and see" approach.

There's probably no way to determine whether or not Red Hat or SuSE
pay their lawyers to read the kernel code, looking for mis-handled
copyright issues.  But I'd guess that there's not a lot of money to be
made that way.
I agree with you on this, Raul, but I also must say that if they adopted a "wait and see" approach, they are putting Novell's and RedHat's assets at stake: if Debian does the same, it would be putting a lot of people's assets at stake: mirror network, CD distributors, some DDs, Debian-based distros, etc.

HTH

Massa





Reply to: