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Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Ubuntu !free
From: |
Dave Page |
Subject: |
Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Ubuntu !free |
Date: |
Sat, 3 May 2008 12:44:17 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.13 (2006-08-11) |
On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 10:41:44AM +0100, Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> That said, I'm not 100% sure that these distributions sans the
> non-free repositories meet the FSF criteria. Debian packages have to
> meet their own set of license requirements which I believe are close
> to the Free software requirements, but differ slightly. I doubt that
> the Linux firmware issues are dealt with fully, for example.
My experience of Debian is that their kernel package maintainers are
*very* stringent about firmware licensing in Linux. There have been a
couple of times of which I'm aware where Debian have removed firmware
from their kernel because its licensing was unclear, typically because
there was a binary blob with no source available in a header file marked
as GPL-licensed.
I've certainly found references on LKML to the Debian kernel team being
"zealots" for questioning the licensing status of code in Linux, or for
asking for source for a GPL-licensed binary blob.
Dave
--
Dave Page <address@hidden>
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