Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263837AbUCZBLR (ORCPT ); Thu, 25 Mar 2004 20:11:17 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263823AbUCZBLQ (ORCPT ); Thu, 25 Mar 2004 20:11:16 -0500 Received: from [218.44.239.78] ([218.44.239.78]:28818 "EHLO webmasters.gr.jp") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263898AbUCZBHv (ORCPT ); Thu, 25 Mar 2004 20:07:51 -0500 Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 10:07:38 +0900 Message-ID: <81ptb0wh45.wl@omega.webmasters.gr.jp> From: GOTO Masanori To: Matthew Wilcox Cc: Jeff Garzik , Adrian Bunk , 239952@bugs.debian.org, debian-devel@lists.debian.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Binary-only firmware covered by the GPL? In-Reply-To: <20040326003339.GD25059@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk> References: <20040325082949.GA3376@gondor.apana.org.au> <20040325220803.GZ16746@fs.tum.de> <40635DD9.8090809@pobox.com> <20040326003339.GD25059@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk> User-Agent: Wanderlust/2.9.9 (Unchained Melody) SEMI/1.14.3 (Ushinoya) FLIM/1.14.3 (=?ISO-8859-4?Q?Unebigory=F2mae?=) APEL/10.3 Emacs/21.2 (i386-debian-linux-gnu) MULE/5.0 (SAKAKI) MIME-Version: 1.0 (generated by SEMI 1.14.3 - "Ushinoya") Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1008 Lines: 24 At Fri, 26 Mar 2004 00:33:39 +0000, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > I realise there's a grey area between "magic data you write to a device" > and "a program that is executed on a different processor". For example, > palette data for a frame buffer. But nobody's arguing for that grey > area here -- it's clearly a program without source code that Debian > can't distribute. Well, I also think this is grey area. But think about: why can we distribute assembler only code in linux kernel? It's near to binary form (objdump -d is your friend). If they insist this source code is GPL, then I think this code is covered under GPL at least for this case. If it's GPL, then we can derive the newer firmware code from this original ql2100_fw.c freely. Regards, -- gotom - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/