Re: [gentoo-dev] Non-free software in Gentoo

[Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org>]

On Tue, Jan 05, 2010 at 11:55:49PM -0500, Vincent Launchbury wrote:
> Greg KH wrote:
> > And note, _I_ placed those images in the kernel image, after consulting
> > lawyers about this issue, so it's not like I don't know what I am
> > talking about here.
> 
> I'm not questioning whether it's legal to distribute non-free firmware
> alongside the GPL. I'm merely saying that the firmware _is_ non-free,
> which should be reflected by the ebuild licenses.

So you are saying that the license for the kernel should show the
license for all of the different firmware files as well?  That would get
pretty unusable, and keep the kernel from being able to be installed on
anyone's machine that didn't want such licenses, right?

Also note that the license of the firmware files do not matter to almost
everyone using the kernel, as almost no one uses those files anymore,
the ones in the linux-firmware package should be used instead.

So as we are a source-based distro, if you object to those firmware
licenses, just don't build them in your kernel builds.  But to expect to
list all of them as the license for the whole kernel package, that's not
a workable solution as far as I can see.

> > So it's a pointless effort.
> 
> To you maybe, but it's important to some. Note that updating the
> licenses would only affect those with strict ACCEPT_LICENSE settings
> anyway. I don't understand why you'd oppose the change.

So you want anyone with such strict settings to not be able to install
the kernel package at all?  If so, what kernel do you want them to be
able to use?  :)

thanks,

greg k-h