On 11/10/2016 12:05 AM, Johannes Berg wrote:
I understand, and I understand that you/they are actually providing it
when asked.
However, the carl9170 project has its (entirely GPL) source tree out in
the open, making it much *easier* and that was *still* thought to not
be sufficient; I don't recall the discussions but I'm guessing that's
because of something like redistributors having to make sure source is
available, and guaranteeing that for a long time, etc.
johannes
Johannes, from that perspective, who are the "redistributors"?
Specifically, is linux-firmware git
repository considered a redistributor or its just hosting files? I mean,
at what moment
someone else other then Quantenna will start to be legally obliged to
make GPL code
used in firmware available for others?
Personally I still hope that linux-firmware itself is not legally
concerned with what is the content of
firmware its hosting, but looks like there already was a precedent case
with carl9170 driver and
we have to somehow deal with it.
There still may be a difference though: Quantenna is semiconductor
company only, software
used on actual products based on Quantenna chipsets is released by other
companies.
I just want to present our legal team with a clear case (and position of
Linux maintainers) so that they can
work with it and make decision on how to proceed.
From technical perspective, as I mentioned, SDK is quite huge and
include a lot of opensource
components including full Linux, I don't think its reasonable to have it
inside linux-firmware tree.
What are the options to share it other then providing it on request basis:
- git repository
- store tarball somewhere on official website
Thanks!
