<posted & mailed> Paul Hampson wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 09, 2004 at 07:10:33PM -0400, Daniel Freedman wrote: >> Unfortunately, I believe that my server board contains one of the rare >> on-board Broadcom chipsets that is completely unable to function (best >> as I can tell), without downloading this firmware, or without at least >> disabling the download of it... In other words, it works perfectly >> with 2.4.26, but not at all with 2.6.8. It's recognized fine, get's >> IP address fine, has kernel modules loaded etc., but simply drops >> packets off the stack... > >> Anyway, just thought I'd see what people think of this, and how the >> Debian community wants to proceed. Is there some way to enable >> compability with this without downloading the firmware and violating >> the DFSG? > > Surely you can grab the firmware yourself, dump it into the appropriate > place in /lib/firmware (the boot message from the tg3 driver tells you) > and then it'll work on next boot? > > This won't break the DFSG as far as I know, 'cause you're not > distributing the firmware and Broadcom presumably are happy for you to > download it yourself for use. > > Unless of course the firmware itself is GPL'd, and therefore no one > can legally give it out without offering the source as well. It is GPLed. This is why it hasn't been put in non-free. :-P Contact Broadcom and ask them to do one of the following things: (1) Release source for the firmware (2) Release the firmware under a license which allows distribution without source Until they do one of these two things, the firmware is not safe to distribute. I don't know why upstream is distributing it; I believe they are simply being sloppy about licensing. > I'm not sure this is the right list for this topic, anyway... > -- This space intentionally left blank.
