Re: Qlogic/FC firmware

From: Ricky Beam (jfbeam@bluetopia.net)
Date: Wed Aug 22 2001 - 09:58:41 EST


On Wed, 22 Aug 2001, Oliver Neukum wrote:
>> > Oh for the love of God, will you people stop drooling over the fucking
>> > GPL? It's *firmware*... it's just a bunch of bits. It's *not* a program
>> > the kernel executes. It's just data. (__init_data to be exact.)
>>
>> Look, if its not distributable then its no good to anyone.
>
>Are you allowed to distribute an initrd that contains it, build from it and
>GNU tools ?

Depends on who's interpreting the license. I say as long as the source to
the whole mess is available (even provided *with* the binaries), you aren't
violating anything. On the otherhand, strictly speaking, once the file
is compiled, it becomes "in binary form" which needs the notice attached to
it in some way -- like all the fine print one finds on any box of stuff from
Sun, Compaq/Digital, Cisco, etc.

However, as others have said, none of us are lawyers. Of course, none of us
have been sued by Qlogic either.

--Ricky

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Aug 23 2001 - 21:00:49 EST