On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 09:53:23 -0800, Suresh Govindachar sgovindachar@yahoo.com wrote:
Not so; I have read their licence.txt -- have you? The licence.txt is in simple English (not leaglease) -- it allows distribution of the firmware.
I hadn't read one since they started providing an open source driver. This one seems roughly OK. I don't know if there is a sticking point somewhere or if no one has re-evaluated the situation recently.
My original question was why use the indirect approach of fwcutter rather than the direct approach of using the stuff provided by Broadcom. The question was _not_ about why Broadcom's firmware is not distributed in Fedora.
I wouldn't consider extracting the firmware from an archive all that direct either. But again, probably the instructions haven't been re-evaluated since Broadcom released the open sourced driver.
I think the reason why Broadcom's firmware is not in Fedora is because Broadcom does not provide (VHDL, Verilog or whatever) source code for the firmware, and Fedora.org wants source code for everything in it distributes.
No. Freely redistributable without modification is OK. This is mentioned on the firmware SIG's page (and some other places): http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/FirmWare#Packaging_guidelines
They may be a good group to poke about the possibility of changing things.
One other thing that might be a sticking point is that this may not be the same firmware expected by the b43 driver.