jeff wrote:
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.
My point is that the details of the aggregation are irrelevant and the
format of the storage doesn't matter. The fact that the firmware
loader can find the correct chunk of data to load for each separate
device shows that the storage maintains the separation.
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?
It's the other way around. Putting things in the same container doesn't
change the copyright of the separate parts. If anything is wrong, it
is the label of the container.
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?
Likewise.
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.
Perhaps a valid issue - and perhaps mistakenly left over from when the
broadcom portion was tagged as GPL.
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"....
That would be a reasonable change. How is it done in drivers where the
firmware has always been known to be non-GPL but redistributable? tg3
might be a special case due to its copyright change.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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