From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: GOTO Masanori Subject: Re: Binary-only firmware covered by the GPL? Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 10:07:38 +0900 Message-ID: <81ptb0wh45.wl@omega.webmasters.gr.jp> References: <20040325082949.GA3376@gondor.apana.org.au> <20040325220803.GZ16746@fs.tum.de> <40635DD9.8090809@pobox.com> <20040326003339.GD25059@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 (generated by SEMI 1.14.3 - "Ushinoya") Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20040326003339.GD25059@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk> Resent-Message-ID: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: List-Archive: 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 List-Id: linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org 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