On May 22, 2008, Toshio Kuratomi a.badger@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks! The Packaging Committee and kernel maintainers will have to look into what's going on here. Although that doesn't address your larger issue of binary firmware.
Indeed, it doesn't. I don't think there are very many of these firmwares that are licensed in such obnoxious terms. But it's certainly not the only example of this kind of problem.
The nouveau-drm patches that we're adding ourselves contain relatively large chunks of "voodoo" [sic] code copied from non-Free drivers by means of mmio dumps, but no copyright notices or licensing associated specifically to those pieces of code. As much as I appreciate what these folks are doing, I'm not sure this approach is ethical, let alone legal. I don't know whether this has been run through legal, but if it hasn't, I suggest that it be.