Les Mikesell wrote:
jeff wrote:
Les Mikesell wrote:
Whatever mechanical translations you can do to something will not
change its copyright status. If you make a tar file containing 2
different copyrighted works, they are still 2 separate works, but
there is nothing magic about tar's format that relates to this concept.
But what is the copyright status of drivers/net/tg3.c? What lines are
GPL (if they are) and which lines are not GPL? I don't mean this as a
theoretical exercise, I mean this *literally*. If you read tg3.c it
*ONLY* says:
/*
* tg3.c: Broadcom Tigon3 ethernet driver.
*
* Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 David S. Miller
(davem@xxxxxxxxxx)
* Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003 Jeff Garzik (jgarzik@xxxxxxxxx)
* Copyright (C) 2004 Sun Microsystems Inc.
* Copyright (C) 2005-2007 Broadcom Corporation.
*
* Firmware is:
* Derived from proprietary unpublished source code,
* Copyright (C) 2000-2003 Broadcom Corporation.
*
* Permission is hereby granted for the distribution of this
firmware
* data in hexadecimal or equivalent format, provided this copyright
* notice is accompanying it.
*/
It never mentions GPL *EXCEPT* here:
MODULE_AUTHOR("David S. Miller (davem@xxxxxxxxxx) and Jeff Garzik
(jgarzik@xxxxxxxxx)");
MODULE_DESCRIPTION("Broadcom Tigon3 ethernet driver");
MODULE_LICENSE("GPL");
But tg3.o as distributed by RedHat/Fedora when it's compiled is *NOT*
a GPL .o, it has the proprietary data in it. It isn't separate at all
(like some firmware, say intel wireless, which is a completely
separate file).
I look at tg3.c and I can't tell where this "aggregation" begins and
ends. It's the *SAME FILE*. Can you clearly say which line numbers are
GPL and which line numbers are not GPL?
I don't know much about kernel drivers and I don't think ordinary humans
are expected to.
Well ordinary humans don't post 20 times to fedora-devel arguing about kernel
drivers either--but you have. You can't just cop out and plead ignorance now.
How lame of you.
I'd approach the question more mechanically, on the
same order as trying to establish if the elements within a tar file are
separate things,
Well, if that tar file is distributed as a GPL file, then everything in it
would be GPL, no?
or if the files represented within an iso image are
separate things.
If the entire ISO is distributed as GPL, it wouldn't be separate would it?
If the compiler stores in a form that the loader can
identify and download to the correct device, I'd be convinced that it is
a separate thing regardless of any intermediate mechanical
transformations or representations.
But they are being *shipped together* in a package whose license says: GPLv2.
$ rpm -qp --queryformat "%{LICENSE}\n" kernel-2.6.26-0.67.rc6.git1.fc10.src.rpm
GPLv2
So RedHat is claiming they are shipping a GPLv2 kernel, when they clearly
aren't (they are also doing it knowingly). Note, there are packages that have a
mix of licenses, and this gets clearly pointed out in the LICENSE tag.
If RedHat has the source to this driver, I believe they are obligated to turn
it over to anyone they have distributed a kernel to--they shouldn't be able to
add proprietary bits to the Linux kernel and keep the code to themselves. Same
is true for broadcom.
So you may be convinced that it is a separate thing (though you are really
really really stretching things, when both tg3.c and tg3.o have everything
combined), but by calling the whole thing GPL, it would encompass that firmware
as well. They are not saying "GPLv2 and Proprietary firmware that is merely
aggregated into the same .o"....
-Jeff
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