Re: tg3 driver fails
On Wed, 6 Jul 2005, David S. Miller wrote:
I would like to personally thank the Debian project for making life
miserable for it's users and making many platforms totally
uninstallable and unusable due to this decision.
I am sure every user who can't use Debian on his system out of the box
because of this firmware problem will not mind because the high moral
standards of the Debian project are much more important than a properly
working system.
Hi Dave,
This decision is indeed unpopular with a lot of people, users and
developers alike. I am not too happy with the way things turned out
myself. However, I completely disagree with the statement that this
situation is a result of some kind of Debian's tantrum, as you present it.
In almost all cases the removal of firmware has nothing to do with
Debian's "moral standards". In fact, the Debian kernel currently contains
a number of firmware files, possibly violating the DFSG. Main reasons why
the files are removed are the lack of _any_ license, licenses explicitly
forbidding (!) the redistribution, or licenses whose conditions cannot be
satisfied (like binary-only firmware licensed as GPL). And redistributing
the intellectual property without an explicit permission is a liability
Debian can't subject itself or its users to. Perhaps, if the kernel
maintainers were a little bit more proactive examining the licenses, this
whole mess could have been avoided.
In fact, Debian is actively working on resolving this situation. Members
of the Debian kernel team have actually made an effort of contacting
Broadcom [0] (and other vendors) and clarifying the terms of their
licenses. After the response from Broadcom's legal team the updated
license, now explicitly permitting the redistribution of tg3 firmware, has
been merged upstream [1] and Debian is going to distribute the
uncrippled driver again starting with 2.6.12. The status of other
communication with vendors may be found at [2].
[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2005/05/msg00203.html
[1] http://kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=49cabf49abd7676d026a61baabf5aae9337a82be;hp=9beb1d587f690d5b2f9087f8f10c0ff9f6b66886
[2] http://wiki.debian.net/?KernelFirmwareLicensing
Best regards,
Jurij Smakov jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC
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