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

[Vincent Launchbury <vincent@doublecreations.com>]

Greg KH wrote:
> The fact that some people claim that the firmware blobs somehow violate
> the GPLv2 license of the kernel is a claim, not a fact, so please do not
> state it as such.  

Hi Greg,

Thanks for your reply.

I think you misunderstood my point though. I wasn't saying that the
firmware violates the GPL, I have no idea whether it does or not. I was
saying that some of the firmware is non-free software, and therefore the
license should include more than just GPL-2. This especially effects
people using ACCEPT_LICENSE to maintain a free system.

> Also note that the majority of these firmware blobs are now removed
> from the kernel, and are in a separate patckage, so this might be
> totally irrelevant at this point in time.

This may be true, but the packages in the main tree still contain
non-free firmware. If this is fixed in a later release, then GPL-2 would
be fine for those.

> So please don't state that the Linux kernel is not properly listed as
> the GPLv2, because it is.

In linux-2.6.31 for example, here are some excerpts from
firmware/WHENCE:

Regarding the keyspan USB driver:
	This firmware may not be modified and may only be used with
	Keyspan hardware.

and the emi26 driver:
	This firmware may not be modified and may only be used with the
	Emagic EMI 2|6 Audio Interface.

I'm not sure if this git repo is part of a separate package or not, but
it seems the same terms are present:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/dwmw2/linux-firmware.git;a=blob;f=WHENCE;h=83d245bee1ec44cbd5c0e1a53a3989c57f675c91;hb=f20b0674534a444ae74239843cac19f72c64912b

Which is why I think the license should be amended. If I'm mistaken,
please do correct me, but based on my above notes, I believe it should
be updated.

Thanks,
Vincent.