Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 4 Apr 2005 23:19:31 +0200 | Subject | Re: non-free firmware in kernel modules, aggregation and unclear copyright notice. | From | Sven Luther <> |
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On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 04:55:27PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 09:29:45PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote: > > > > Nope, i am aiming to clarify this issue with regard to the debian kernel, so > > that we may be clear with ourselves, and actually ship something which is not > > of dubious legal standing, and that we could get sued over for GPL violation. > > > > You know, the fact that Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, and pretty much all > other commercial distributions have not been worried about getting > sued for this alleged GPL'ed violation makes it a lot harder for me > (and others, I'm sure) take Debian's concerns seriously.
They probably didn't care :)
> The problem may be that because Debian is purely a non-profit, and so > it can't clearly balance the costs and benefits of trying trying to > avoid every single possible risks where someone might decide to file a > lawsuit. Anytime you do *anything* you risk the possibility of a > lawsuit, and if you allow the laywers to take over your business > decisions, the natural avoid-risks-all-costs bias of lawyers are such > that it will either drive a company out of business, or drive a > non-profit distribution into irrelevance.....
Yes, the problem is indeed that we don't have a legal department which can counter sue, and we are present in a much more widespread area than other companies you cited above.
And ubuntu has those driver in their non-free equivalent also.
> If Debian wants to be this fanatical, then let those Debian developers > who care do all of the work to make this happen, and stop bothering > LKML. And if it continues to remain the case that a user will have to > manually edit /etc/apt/sources.lists (using vi!) to include a > reference to non-free in order to install Debian on a system that > requires the tg3 device driver, then I will have to tell users who ask > me that they would be better off using some other distribution which > actually cares about their needs.
I don't get this, and you threat me as fanatic. I am only saying that the tg3.c and other file are under the GPL, and that the firmware included in it is *NOT* intented to be under the GPL, so why not say it explicitly ?
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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