Re: non-free firmware in kernel modules, aggregation and unclear copyright notice.

Jeff Garzik
2005-04-07T09:35:26Z

Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org> writes:
>
>
>>On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 11:11 +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>>
>>>On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 09:49:25AM +0100, Ian Campbell wrote:
>>>
>>>>I don't think you did get a rejection, a few people said that _they_
>>>>weren't going to do it, but if you want to then go ahead. I think people
>>>>are just fed up of people bringing up the issue and then failing to do
>>>>anything about it -- so prove them wrong ;-)
>>>
>>>Actually patches to add firmware loader support to tg3 got rejected.
>>
>>I think they will be accepted if they first introduce a transition
>>period where tg3 will do request_firmware() and only use the built-in
>>firmware if that fails. Second step is to make the built-in firmware a
>>config option and then later on when the infrastructure matures for
>>firmware loading/providing firmware it can be removed from the driver
>>entirely.
>
>
> For tg3 a transition period shouldn't be needed as firmware loading
> is only needed on old/buggy hardware which is not the common case.
> Or to support advanced features which can be disabled.

TSO firmware is commonly used these days.

> I am fairly certain in that case the firmware came from the bcm5701
> broadcom driver for the tg3 which I think is gpl'd. So the firmware
> may legitimately be under the GPL.

It is.

Jeff