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

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org> writes:

> On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 11:11 +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 09:49:25AM +0100, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > > I don't think you did get a rejection, a few people said that _they_
> > > weren't going to do it, but if you want to then go ahead. I think people
> > > are just fed up of people bringing up the issue and then failing to do
> > > anything about it -- so prove them wrong ;-)
> > 
> > Actually patches to add firmware loader support to tg3 got rejected.
> 
> I think they will be accepted if they first introduce a transition
> period where tg3 will do request_firmware() and only use the built-in
> firmware if that fails. Second step is to make the built-in firmware a
> config option and then later on when the infrastructure matures for
> firmware loading/providing firmware it can be removed from the driver
> entirely.

For tg3 a transition period shouldn't be needed as firmware loading
is only needed on old/buggy hardware which is not the common case.
Or to support advanced features which can be disabled.

I am fairly certain in that case the firmware came from the bcm5701 
broadcom driver for the tg3 which I think is gpl'd.   So the firmware
may legitimately be under the GPL.

Eric