On Monday 26 April 2010 16:34:36 Celejar wrote: > On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:16:32 -0500 > "Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <bss@iguanasuicide.net> wrote: > > On Monday 26 April 2010 15:09:57 Celejar wrote: > > > What makes the non-free firmware question particularly interesting is > > > that the alternative is often to hardcode the functionality into the > > > hardware. Now, if you had a board with completely closed HW, but that > > > presented an open, well documented interface for the driver, most > > > people would be very happy (although there are, of course, the open > > > hardware crusaders - more power to them!). So, now that they've simply > > > implemented some of that functionality in SW, in the form of firmware > > > which the driver installs on the card, but which has nothing to do with > > > your host machine, are you really any worse off? > > > > As a distributor you may very well be. If you can't provide the source > > code, you can't satisfy the terms of the GPL (usually). > > ? We're talking about firmware for things like wireless cards, produced > by the HW manufacturers, e.g., Broadcom. Where does the GPL enter into > this? Some are included in the tarball provided by the Linux kernel team, which is distributed under the GPLv2. In particular, I am thinking of the iwl3945 firmware that is required to run my wireless card. It doesn't matter what upstream wants to call source code. The GPL(v2) defines it as the preferred form for making modifications. (GPLv2, section 3.) It is unlikely that the firmware was written in a hex editor (or equivalent). Most likely it is C source for a freestanding (non-hosted) environment with some manufacturer-specific libraries, but it could also be in some manufacturer-specific assembly code. Either form would be better for making modifications than a binary blob. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/
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