Re: Binary-only firmware covered by the GPL?

GOTO Masanori
2004-03-26T01:07:38Z

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