On Sun, 2008-06-08 at 18:39 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote: > > Alex now says it isn't good enough, and is actually counter-productive. > > If I get Alex correctly he is saying that, to his goal, which is 100% Free > software everywhere (including in his toothbrush), this is counterproductive, > as it may make it easier to distribute binary firmware along with the kernel, > as it now could be put in a seperate tarbal removing GPL worries etc. If it's a GPL violation to ship the non-GPL'd firmware in the source tarball, it's also a GPL violation to distribute it as part of a vmlinux. So yes, putting it in a separate source tarball removes the GPL worries there -- but if you're then going to use the CONFIG_BUILTIN_FIRMWARE feature and build non-GPL'd firmware into your vmlinux, that brings exactlly those same worries right back again. If you build non-GPL'd firmware into your kernel, you may not distribute that kernel image (although currently we do just that; we shouldn't). > If the firmware truely gets put in a different tarbal (and thus eventually in a > different srpm), then it will be feasible to do a no blobs included Fedora spin > like gnewsense, which would be great. Fedora already uses 'doctored' tarballs for stuff like openssh; I think it would be reasonable enough to do that with a firmware-less kernel source tarball too. It's easy enough to build the firmware package separately (although first, I'm going to make the kernel srpm spit out a 'kernel-firmware' subpackage; we can talk about splitting it later). > Now Alex worries about someone still slipping in some firmware into the kernel > itself instead of into the firmware package, well as with the current situation > with a completely seperate kernel, audits will still be necessary. That's nothing special -- it's just the same as we should always be vigilant for someone slipping non-GPL'd _code_ into the kernel. Should we just give up, just because people slip up occasionally? -- dwmw2 -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
