Plan for tomorrows (20080522) FESCO meeting

[Alexandre Oliva]

On May 21, 2008, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:

> Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> On May 21, 2008, David Woodhouse <dwmw2 at infradead.org> wrote:

>> Does anyone think the issue about non-Free firmwares is any different
>> from the issue of non-Free drivers for nvidia cards, except for the
>> irrelevant detail that these different pieces of software can corrupt
>> the system (technically and morally) running on different CPUs?

> Yes.

>> Seriously?

> Yes.

> There's free software as in legally licensed for us to use distribute
> and modify and there's free software as in four freedoms free.  Unless
> I've missed something, the firmware in the kernel is licensed under
> the GPLv2 and therefore it is legally licensed for us to use,
> distribute, and modify.

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you did indeed miss
something.

Have a look at the license for drivers/net/tokenring/3c359_microcode.h

2 /*
3 * The firmware this driver downloads into the tokenring card is a
4 * separate program and is not GPL'd source code, even though the Linux
5 * side driver and the routine that loads this data into the card are.
6 *
7 * This firmware is licensed to you strictly for use in conjunction
8 * with the use of 3Com 3C359 TokenRing adapters. There is no
9 * waranty expressed or implied about its fitness for any purpose.
10 */ 

This is just one out of some 30 examples of such licenses in the
kernel.  And, heck, this one doesn't even grant permission for
redistribution.  What are those Linux-no-libre guys thinking?


Anyhow...  How does this relate with my question quoted above?

nVidia's video drivers are non-Free.  firmware included in the kernel,
as well as the other redistributable firmware included separately in
Fedora, are non-Free.

The hair-splitters that try to invent an artificial difference based
on what CPU the code runs on don't only miss the point on supporting
unethical vendors, but also on their very amoral technical grounds for
introducing the artificial distinction: they're supposed to run on
*some* CPU on *some* users' machines, and since we don't know what
they're doing and they run in privileged mode (on whatever CPU they
run), they're at least in theory perfectly capable of wreaking havoc
on the entire system, and in fact some of them do.

So why the exception again?  Because users can't live without them?
Well, sure some users can't.  Nobody stops such users from being
informed by Fedora about the problems in their hardware and how to get
ahold of the hardware vendor to obtain some software (presumably
non-Free) that will get the hardware going.  Fedora doesn't need to
carry such software, and Fedora doesn't need to promote or encourage
its use.

> .. [1]: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#BinaryFirmware

I'm well aware of that exception.  Nowhere does it say "we must force
binary firmware onto every Fedora user's machine, and we must avoid at
all costs any attempts to enable users to prevent the installation of
such binary firwmare on their machines" :-)

-- 
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}