On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:16:32 -0500 "Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <b...@iguanasuicide.net> wrote:
> On Monday 26 April 2010 15:09:57 Celejar wrote: ... > > What makes the non-free firmware question particularly interesting is > > that the alternative is often to hardcode the functionality into the > > hardware. Now, if you had a board with completely closed HW, but that > > presented an open, well documented interface for the driver, most > > people would be very happy (although there are, of course, the open > > hardware crusaders - more power to them!). So, now that they've simply > > implemented some of that functionality in SW, in the form of firmware > > which the driver installs on the card, but which has nothing to do with > > your host machine, are you really any worse off? > > As a distributor you may very well be. If you can't provide the source code, > you can't satisfy the terms of the GPL (usually). ? We're talking about firmware for things like wireless cards, produced by the HW manufacturers, e.g., Broadcom. Where does the GPL enter into this? Celejar -- foffl.sourceforge.net - Feeds OFFLine, an offline RSS/Atom aggregator mailmin.sourceforge.net - remote access via secure (OpenPGP) email ssuds.sourceforge.net - A Simple Sudoku Solver and Generator -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100426173436.20bb15d2.cele...@gmail.com
