Re: The bigger issue is badly licensed blobs (was Re: Firmware poll
On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 10:30:07AM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
> [-devel trimmed]
>
> Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> > Please reread the discussion on debian-legal about this, where consensus was
> > mostly found to support this idea, and also remember that we contacted
> > broadcom with this analysis, who contacted their legal team, and i also mailed
> > the FSF lawyers with it, and got no counter-claim to it.
>
> Which discussion?
Err, the discussion about this exact issue hold on debian-legal and
debian-kernel and partly LKML in fall last year. I made some detailed analysis
of the problem, and got input from various d-l folk, i think i even remember
you participating in it.
> What responses did you get from broadcom and FSF lawyers?
> (The above makes it sound like you maybe got no responses.)
Broadcom consulted with its lawyer team, and then changed the licencing of the
firmware blob accordyingly. Most if not all of this is public in
debian-kernel, so you can check for yourself.
I posted the FSF address for legal and lawyer issue, but got no reply, at
least i don't remember a reply, as hinted above, altough i don't know if
this was over busy-ness of their folk over things like the GFDL and GPL3
at that time, or whatever, but i believe that if my analysis was obviously
wrong, they would have replied, given the importance of the non-free firmware
to the FSF and the free software community in general, and that there was a
rather big and emotional thread in LKML about this. Not sure though.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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