On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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). But where do you draw the line? A "crack-inspired" judge might argue that the fact that regulation is done in software is a problem regardless of the drivers license / nature. -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
