Re: Plan for tomorrows (20080522) FESCO meeting

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva redhat com>]

On May 22, 2008, Toshio Kuratomi <a badger gmail com> wrote:

> Thanks!  The Packaging Committee and kernel maintainers will have to
> look into what's going on here.  Although that doesn't address your
> larger issue of binary firmware.

Indeed, it doesn't.  I don't think there are very many of these
firmwares that are licensed in such obnoxious terms.  But it's
certainly not the only example of this kind of problem.

The nouveau-drm patches that we're adding ourselves contain relatively
large chunks of "voodoo" [sic] code copied from non-Free drivers by
means of mmio dumps, but no copyright notices or licensing associated
specifically to those pieces of code.  As much as I appreciate what
these folks are doing, I'm not sure this approach is ethical, let
alone legal.  I don't know whether this has been run through legal,
but if it hasn't, I suggest that it be.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva {lsd ic unicamp br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva {redhat com, gcc.gnu.org}