On Wed, 2004-06-16 at 17:18, Michael Poole wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > > On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 03:21:38PM -0500, Joe Wreschnig wrote: > > > > [firmware as mere aggregation] > >> Kernel copyright holders think otherwise, as do many other people. > > > > Out of curiosity, could you please show an email from such copyright > > holder (with some references to the code in kernel contributed by > > that person) that would say so? > > > > It's not impossible that such a thing exists; however, I've heard the > > quoted statement a *LOT* and so far it always turned out either "FOAF > > heard about that somewhere" or "well, there's got to be at least one!". > > > > Care to show evidence for your statement? alt.folklore.urban rules, > > please. > > A little Google shows that Yggdrasil has made such an argument: > http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/04/msg00130.html > > Unfortunately for Mr. Richter, Linux does not seem to contain any > copyright notices attributable to him or Yggdrasil before 2000. As I > cited elsewhere, this is at least FOUR YEARS after firmware was > included in the kernel, so he cannot fairly claim infringement. He > should have known that binary firmware existed in the kernel before.
I think it's fair to say he was misled by repeated statements that Linux was under the GPL, e.g. from README: It is distributed under the GNU General Public License - see the accompanying COPYING file for more details. Given the huge amount of code in Linux, it's very possible he didn't even see any of the non-GPLd code at first, and I would consider it totally reasonable to trust the README of a program at the outset. -- Joe Wreschnig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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