Re: Binary-only firmware covered by the GPL?

[GOTO Masanori]

At Fri, 26 Mar 2004 00:33:39 +0000,
Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> I realise there's a grey area between "magic data you write to a device"
> and "a program that is executed on a different processor".  For example,
> palette data for a frame buffer.  But nobody's arguing for that grey
> area here -- it's clearly a program without source code that Debian
> can't distribute.

Well, I also think this is grey area.

But think about: why can we distribute assembler only code in linux
kernel?  It's near to binary form (objdump -d is your friend).

If they insist this source code is GPL, then I think this code is
covered under GPL at least for this case.  If it's GPL, then we can
derive the newer firmware code from this original ql2100_fw.c freely.

Regards,
-- gotom
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/