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

Adrian Bunk
2005-04-08T00:32:11Z

On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 11:05:05PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 10:56:47PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>...
> > If your statement was true that Debian must take more care regarding
> > legal risks than commercial distributions, can you explain why Debian
> > exposes the legal risks of distributing software capable of decoding
> > MP3's to all of it's mirrors?
>
> I don't know and don't really care. I don't maintain any mp3 player (err,
> actually i do, i package quark, but use it mostly to play .oggs, maybe i
> should think twice about this now that you made me aware of it), but in any
> case, i am part of the debian kernel maintainer team, and as such have a
> responsability to get those packages uploaded and past the screening of the
> ftp-masters. I believe the planned solution is vastly superior to the current
> one of simply removing said firmware blobs from the drivers, which caused more
> harm than helped, which is why we are set to clarifying this for the
> post-sarge kernels.

Debian doesn't seem to care much about the possible legal problems of
patents.

The firmware issues are an urgent real problem?

Debian should define how much legal risk they are willing to impose on
their mirrors and distributors and should act accordingly in all areas.

But ignoring some areas while being more religious than RMS in other
areas is simply silly.

> That said, i was under the understanding that after the SCO disaster,
> clarification of licencing issues and copyright attributions was a welcome
> thing here, but maybe i misunderstood those whole issues.

"SCO disaster"?

It is a disaster for SCO.

> Friendly,
>
> Sven Luther

cu
Adrian

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