Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2006 11:25:35 +0000
From: Alan <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
To: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>, Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de>,
       Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>, Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>,
       Martin Bligh <mbligh@mbligh.org>,
       "Michael K. Edwards" <medwards.linux@gmail.com>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: GPL only modules [was Re: [GIT PATCH] more Driver core patches
 for 2.6.19]
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On Thu, 14 Dec 2006 08:21:20 +0000
David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org> wrote:

> If they fail to do that under the 'honour system' then I'm not averse to
> 'enforcing' it by technical measures. (For some value of 'enforcement'
> which is easy for them to patch out if their lawyers are _really_ sure
> they'll win when I sue them, that is.)

There are specific rules against removal of technical measures *even if
the result is legal*. It is an offence in many countries thanks to the
RIAA lobbyists and their corrupt pet politicians to remove technical
measures applied to a -public domain- work.

So your argument doesn't fly.

> Not on my part. The thing that makes me _particularly_ vehement about
> binary-only crap this week is a very much a technical issue -- in
> particular, the fact that we had to do post-production board
> modifications to shoot our wireless chip in the head when it goes AWOL,
> because the code for it wasn't available to us.

Consider it an education process. Hopefully the contracts for the
chips/docs were watertight enough you can sue the offending supplier for
the total cost of the rework. If not then you are really complaining
about getting contract negotiations wrong.

> It's better to have a coherent approach, and for all of us to do it on
> roughly the same timescale. Getting the distributions do so this is
> going to be like herding cats -- having it upstream and letting it
> trickle down is a much better approach, I think.

I doubt any distribution but the FSF "purified" Debian (the one that has
no firmware so doesn't work) would do it.

Alan
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