Le lundi 03 novembre 2008 à 13:33 +0100, Loïc Minier a écrit : > On Mon, Nov 03, 2008, Josselin Mouette wrote: > > Since SSL certificates are randomly generated data, they are not subject > > to copyright law, so I don’t think they are in any grey area. We can > > change them without any licensing issue, it’s just that they won’t > > fulfill their job if we do. > > I'm not arguing about their copyright(-ability): just that we can't > usefully modify them; and still, the private key is the source to > create the certificate (even if it's random data), and we don't have it > in main. The same goes with firmware: we might have the right to > distribute modified binary firmwares, and they are sufficiently useful > as they are, even without accompanying ultimate source.
Ah, firmwares without source but with a free (e.g. MIT) license are another story. This is definitely a grey area, since I guess many upstreams are working on the binary directly, but there are also some who compile it from C sources or assembly. For some of them the tools are available, for some of them they are in-house, for some of them the tool is a hex editor. And I don’t think we can easily distinguish between them. Firmwares without a free license should go to non-free, regardless of their format. > > Firmware images are very different. They are binary code, only code not > > meant for execution on the host CPU. They are similar to non-free data > > for games: stuff that we cannot modify and with which we can live > > without modifying, but it would be useful to be able to, and it is > > impossible to distribute it in main. > > The non-free games data I know of is non-free because we may not modify > it because the license doesn't explicitely allow it; what specific > example did you have in mind? This is IMO different from firmware > binaries which we may well be allowed to change, but don't have the > tools/doc to do so. Yes, I didn’t understand you were talking about “free” firmware without sources. -- .''`. : :' : We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code. `. `' We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to `- our own. Resistance is futile.
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