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Re: [Gnewsense-dev] [KERNEL] report on actual bugs


From: Sam Geeraerts
Subject: Re: [Gnewsense-dev] [KERNEL] report on actual bugs
Date: Sun, 02 Aug 2009 13:24:11 +0200
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 (X11/20090711)

crap0101 schreef:
Hi!
Here's a report about open bug regarding the kernel:

* (mach64.h) http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00212
About the mach64.h bug, there's no news.  I and the fsf licencing team
have tried to contact ATI, but no answer yet.
If someone have technical/licence knowledge useful for this, please
share it :)

After this long it's doubtful that you'll get an answer back. The FSF
have said it's better to remove it then [1]. It might be worth it to let
ATI know that we're removing it. Maybe they respond better to actions
than to words (if they care at all).

* (mroute.h) http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00287

Regarding mroute, I wrote also in the linux-libre mailing list, this is
the A. Oliva answer
http://www.fsfla.org/pipermail/linux-libre/2009-June/000654.html
about. Like suggested, I took a look into the mroute package, but like
said in the bug's page, the fragmentetion make difficult to find the
lines of code used in the lnux version. This may take some time (I still
don`t do that).
More info about this bug:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#Bad_Licenses
http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg04177.html

As Alexandre said, it's not certain that this code was taken directly from mroute and it would be a good idea to check how it came into Linux in the first place. You might want to contact Linux Kernel Newbies [1] to get an idea of how to go about that.

* (cfi.h) http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00243

mailing the linux-libre list, A. Oliva said that's not a bug:
http://www.fsfla.org/pipermail/linux-libre/2009-June/000653.html
what do you think?

Also, I got response for address@hidden They said:

Il giorno mar, 30/06/2009 alle 16.31 -0400, Donald R Robertson III via
RT ha scritto:
Hello,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

address@hidden - Fri Jun 05 09:06:10 2009]:

Hi, I'm Marco.

checking the Linux Kernel, I've got probably non free file "cfi.h"
located in /include/linux/mtd folder of the kernel's source package.
Is similar to the mach64.h [gnu.org #384122] issue but,
In this case it might be a little different. As far as I can
understand,
we have some code that was made available by Intel through that site,
and that site actually does include licensing terms for the content
being downloaded. Unfortunately the terms are extremely restrictive,
and
are absolutely non-free.

Intel has been supportive of free software in the past (they made
numerous assignments to the FSF), so it might be possible to get
alternate permission to use this code.
[...]

Contrary to what I said when you first brought this issue up, I tend to agree with Alexandre. As I understand it, this file was created with the help of information that may be patented, but it's not a copy of some non-free code. So it's different from the mach64 case, where (possibly) some code was copied from one or more examples.

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-users/2008-11/msg00034.html
[2] http://kernelnewbies.org/




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