Andrew Suffield writes: > The compiled kernel is almost certainly a derivative of the firmware > included in it. A good lawyer might be able to get you out of > this. Debian can *not* afford to assume that it would win such a case, > not least because of a lack of funding for good lawyers.
Anyone who wanted to go after Debian would have a hard time of it: They would have to prove not only that the combined kernel is a derived work, but also that there were no binary blobs in the kernel when they started contributing and that they still have standing to make a claim. Estoppel would bar a claim if the plaintiff first contributed code to a kernel that already had binary blob components. A merely decent lawyer may be able to invoke laches depending on how long an author was silent after the first binary blob was added to the kernel, but merely decent lawyers are not much cheaper than good lawyers. By way of example, the DGRS driver firmware was added to Linux sometime before linux-2.0 was released in June 1996. It stayed more than seven years. That kind of delay in discovering alleged rights reminds me more of a certain Lindon, Utah-based company than of serious developers, and smacks of revisionist history. Michael
