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

Roland Dreier
2005-04-04T20:04:17Z

Ian> I think what Greg may have meant[0] was that if it bothers
Ian> you, then you should act by contacting the copyright holders
Ian> privately yourself in each case that you come across and
Ian> asking them if you may add a little comment etc, and then
Ian> submit patches once you have their agreement.

Perhaps another solution would be for someone who has received a
supposedly GPLed Linux kernel from, say, SuSE, to contact SuSE and ask
for the source code to things such as

static u32 tg3FwText[(TG3_FW_TEXT_LEN / sizeof(u32)) + 1] = {
0x00000000, 0x10000003, 0x00000000, 0x0000000d, 0x0000000d, 0x3c1d0800,
0x37bd3ffc, 0x03a0f021, 0x3c100800, 0x26100000, 0x0e000018, 0x00000000,
0x0000000d, 0x3c1d0800, 0x37bd3ffc, 0x03a0f021, 0x3c100800, 0x26100034,
0x0e00021c, 0x00000000, 0x0000000d, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000,
0x27bdffe0, 0x3c1cc000, 0xafbf0018, 0xaf80680c, 0x0e00004c, 0x241b2105,
/* ... */

in drivers/net/tg3.c. (tg3.c does not contain any license information
at all, and therefore falls under the kernel's GPLv2 license, right?)

- R.