Les Mikesell wrote:
David Woodhouse wrote:
Not everyone agrees with your interpretation of the GPL, and plenty of
people are happy to distribute binary blobs.
Just for the record -- this is the licence you speak of 'interpreting':
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If
identifiable sections of that work are NOT DERIVED from the
Program, and can be reasonably considered INDEPENDENT AND
SEPARATE WORKS in themselves, then this License, and its terms,
do not apply to those sections WHEN YOU DISTRIBUTE THEM AS
SEPARATE WORKS.
But when you distribute the SAME SECTIONS AS PART OF A WHOLE
which is a work based on the Program, the DISTRIBUTION OF THE
WHOLE MUST BE ON THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE, whose permissions
for other licensees extend to the ENTIRE WHOLE, and thus to
EACH AND EVERY PART REGARDLESS OF WHO WROTE IT.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or
contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the
intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of
derivative OR COLLECTIVE WORKS based on the Program.
Personally, I can't find even a _wilful_ misinterpretation which permits
non-GPL'd firmware blobs to be included in the kernel itself, without
being completely crazy about it. But maybe that's just me.
Do you think the firmware provided by some other vendor is somehow
derived from or based on portion of the GPL'd kernel?
Do you think it is part of the kernel-as-a-whole when it loads/runs
completely separately on some other component? I don't see how you can
have any interpretation other than it being an unrelated chunk that is
conveniently aggregated with a loader to make a piece of hardware behave
better. If you really believe firmware is a derivative of the kernel
you wouldn't be able to run linux on anything with firmware in ROM
either. Loading it as the kernel loads doesn't make it any more or less
a part of the kernel work-as-a-whole.
Alexandre Oliva already said this is not a matter of licensing
compatibility but just licensing (ie) the firmware inside the kernel
doesn't have the equivalent source code. He hasn't claimed that firmware
inside the kernel is a GPL violation.
Rahul
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