Vendor only distributable packages - was " Kernel 2059 from Dave Jones fixes nvidia.ko loading"

Nils Philippsen nphilipp at redhat.com
Thu Mar 23 15:06:37 UTC 2006


On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 17:55 -0600, Jeff Vian wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 09:23 +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 16:37 -0600, John Morris wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 09:03, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > > 
> > > > in some jurisdictions there is a legal precedent for linking to
> > > > "illegal" content to be just as bad as distributing it. Now I'm not
> > > > saying that the flash plugin is illegal (it's not afaik) but the
> > > > parallel is enough to scare many lawyers ;)
> > > 
> > > I really doubt there could be legal implications to pointing to an ftp
> > > site.  Even if they prefer people go to the webpage there has been
> > > enough cases now about linking to pretty much settle that issue.
> > > 
> > > But has anyone at RH tried asking for permission?  Including preset repo
> > > lines for livna is right out, both legally and morally for the mission
> > > of Fedora.  But what about the idea of a legal but non-free catagory for
> > > Flash, Acrobat, Nvidia, ATI, etc? 
> > 
> > what makes you think NVidia and ATI are legal?
> > 
> Since the vendor(s) makes them available for free download I would guess
> there is no question of legality here.

"Since that ... friend ... made that ... uhm ... {colourful mushrooms,
{brown,white} substance} ... available for free ..." -- finishing that
(slightly overdone) analogy and discussing its validity is left as an
exercise to the reader (hint: just because something is there it doesn't
mean it's legal).

Nils
-- 
     Nils Philippsen    /    Red Hat    /    nphilipp at redhat.com
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary
 Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."  --  B. Franklin, 1759
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