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Hi, Hauro Carvalho Chehab wrote: > Hi Oliver, > > > @Mauro: > > Is there a way to strip this stuff from Kconfig/Makefile/av7110*.[ch] > > for submission to the kernel? Basically I don't care whether and how > > they cripple the driver in the kernel. But I would like to keep the code > > 'as is' in the linuxtv repositories. > > Having a binary firmware inside a GPL'd file seems to be (at least for some > people) a GPL violation, since the firmware source code should also be released > with GPL (please read [1] for a good article about this). > > This seems to be one of the reasons for moving all firmwares that are still in > kernel into a separate dir. A latter step seems to move those files to a cousin > tree, hosted together with kernel tree, and clearly stating that those > firmwares are not GPL, but are allowed to be used with Linux. > > IANAL, but, if the firmware is violating GPL at Kernel, the same violation also > affects our tree. So, from legal POV, I think we ought to do the same thing at > V4L/DVB. > > Probably, it is safe to keep the firmware files into a separate dir, > if we state clearly that the firmwares are not GPL. Imo it it naive to believe that it makes any difference whether you compile the firmware into the driver, load it from a firmware directory, or load it from userspace. The point is that a binary firmware is used. If the linux maintainers do not want drivers which require a firmware, they should state this clearly, and remove these drivers from the kernel tree. Of course this would render linux useless for many applications. For example, many (most?) recent DVB cards require a firmware binary for the frontend... > Anyway, let's see how we can handle it after having those patches merged at > mainstream. To make it clear: I NACK the removal of the DVB_AV7110_FIRMWARE Kconfig option. Even if it is removed from the kernel, I will keep this option in my driver trees. If this is not possible at linuxtv, I will maintain the driver somewhere else. Sorry. :-( CU Oliver -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- VDR Remote Plugin 0.4.0: http://www.escape-edv.de/endriss/vdr/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- |
