Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Ubuntu !free

[Dave Page]

On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 10:41:44AM +0100, Andrew John Hughes wrote:

> That said, I'm not 100% sure that these distributions sans the
> non-free repositories meet the FSF criteria.  Debian packages have to
> meet their own set of license requirements which I believe are close
> to the Free software requirements, but differ slightly.  I doubt that
> the Linux firmware issues are dealt with fully, for example.

My experience of Debian is that their kernel package maintainers are
*very* stringent about firmware licensing in Linux. There have been a
couple of times of which I'm aware where Debian have removed firmware
from their kernel because its licensing was unclear, typically because
there was a binary blob with no source available in a header file marked
as GPL-licensed.

I've certainly found references on LKML to the Debian kernel team being
"zealots" for questioning the licensing status of code in Linux, or for
asking for source for a GPL-licensed binary blob.

Dave
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Dave Page <address@hidden>
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