On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 11:05 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote: > The Broadcom position seems to be entirely crack-inspired, if it's based > on the notion that a binary driver cannot be modified to break the > regulations. That assumption is demonstrably false. In the lawyers' defense, lots of things happen in courtrooms which apear crack-inspired to those of us who aren't part of the legal process (and, frequently, also to those who are). I could certainly see a creative lawyer trying to argue that a driver under an open source license implicitly encourages modification of the relevant code, while a driver under a closed source license implicitly discourages it or even explicitly prohibits it (I haven't checked, but the closed source drivers may be shipped with a license which claims to prohibit end-user modification). And I could see a crack-inspired judge agreeing. This is the kind of crap lawyers have to think of. (I agree that it would have been an awful lot simpler to just limit the hardware, but then they'd have to make variants of the hardware for all different markets, since the range of allowed/required frequencies differs around the world). -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
