On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 04:55:27PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 09:29:45PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote: > > > > Nope, i am aiming to clarify this issue with regard to the debian kernel, so > > that we may be clear with ourselves, and actually ship something which is > > not > > of dubious legal standing, and that we could get sued over for GPL > > violation. > > > > You know, the fact that Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, and pretty much all > other commercial distributions have not been worried about getting > sued for this alleged GPL'ed violation makes it a lot harder for me > (and others, I'm sure) take Debian's concerns seriously.
They probably didn't care :) > The problem may be that because Debian is purely a non-profit, and so > it can't clearly balance the costs and benefits of trying trying to > avoid every single possible risks where someone might decide to file a > lawsuit. Anytime you do *anything* you risk the possibility of a > lawsuit, and if you allow the laywers to take over your business > decisions, the natural avoid-risks-all-costs bias of lawyers are such > that it will either drive a company out of business, or drive a > non-profit distribution into irrelevance..... Yes, the problem is indeed that we don't have a legal department which can counter sue, and we are present in a much more widespread area than other companies you cited above. And ubuntu has those driver in their non-free equivalent also. > If Debian wants to be this fanatical, then let those Debian developers > who care do all of the work to make this happen, and stop bothering > LKML. And if it continues to remain the case that a user will have to > manually edit /etc/apt/sources.lists (using vi!) to include a > reference to non-free in order to install Debian on a system that > requires the tg3 device driver, then I will have to tell users who ask > me that they would be better off using some other distribution which > actually cares about their needs. I don't get this, and you threat me as fanatic. I am only saying that the tg3.c and other file are under the GPL, and that the firmware included in it is *NOT* intented to be under the GPL, so why not say it explicitly ? Friendly, Sven Luther -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
