Re: drop or keep non-free - from users viewpoint

[Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>]

Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:

>  But then everyone else who is saving their time by using Sven's
>  driver would have to duplicate it, and that may be a significant
>  amount of time lost that culd have gone towards something more
>  useful (anyone who can generate a new driver has a modicum of
>  technical competence). Even worse, someone transitioning to Debian,
>  helped by that driver, shall no longer have access, and not yet
>  being able to compile their own drivers, leave -- and we have lost
>  a future contributor.

I've also wondered lately about about cases where the software is
legally required[1] to be nonfree.  What got me to thinking about that
was the madwifi drivers for the Atheros a/b/g chipset.

Presuming I understand the issue correctly, there is a small bit of
code that is not, and can not legally be made publically available, at
least not in the US.  That's because the Atheros chip is a flexible
piece of hardware, capable of doing all kinds of things in the radio
spectrum that the FCC (at least in the US) forbids.  So although I
believe the developers of the madwifi drivers actually have the source
to the bit of code that configures the chip to operate within the
regulations, they can only release the resulting object file.  The
rest of the driver code (nearly all of it) is completely free.

I suppose one could claim that Atheros just shouldn't have created
such a flexible chip, and should have hard-coded the the chip for the
current (each?) regulatory domain.  I suppose in that case, you would
be making a strong distinction based on the actual storage (or perhaps
execution) medium -- of the code EEPROM (or ROM) vs RAM.

[1] Of course IANAL, and I may well be misunderstanding the state of
affairs -- i.e. is distribution in this case actually illegal in the
US, or is Atheros just covering themselves?

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
GPG starting 2002-11-03 = 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592  F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4