Fedora Freedom and linux-libre

[Les Mikesell]

Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> 
>> learn about the actual legal caselaw in the case things like books,
> 
> Since you appear to have done your homework, could you please help me
> find any case in which a book was published containing an article
> whose authors wrote something like 'I will only permit the publication
> of this article if all the articles in the book, and the whole of the
> book, are under a copyleft license', the book was published with of
> non-copyleft material, and the author of the article sued for
> copyright infringement?

Even if such a copyright existed, it would not resemble the GPL which 
explicitly permits works with other terms to be aggregated (and probably 
would trigger some anti-competitive laws if it tried to restrict that). 
  You'll note that printed combinations of different works do exist and 
the terms under which each is included do not affect the others.

> The GPL, for example, is a mere grant of permissions.  It does not
> require or prohibit anything, it just grants bounded permissions.
> Whatever is forbidden even in the presence of the GPL is forbidden
> because the law forbids such actions without a license that permits
> them, not because the GPL prohibits them.

And thus it has no relationship to other things that might be carried in 
the same container, regardless of the form of that container.  Firmware 
that happens to live in a vmlinuz container for a while is still no more 
a part of the kernel than it would be if you had a bag of ROMs that you 
had to insert yourself to get the same code loaded in your hardware. 
The difference is just the convenience of the update mechanism.  Perhaps 
someone could write a non-GPL'd alternative loader that would install 
the firmware and hardware initializers, then load the kernel just to 
prove this point if they wanted to waste time like writing the fgmp 
library once did to enable distribution of some less restricted code.

>> Nothing of the sort. I'm suggesting conventional interpretations of copyright
>> law might apply. The ones the lawyers seem to consider conventional
> 
> IIRC it says that modifying, distributing (including publishing) a
> work requires permission from the copyright holder, and, in the
> absence of such a permission, such acts are forbidden by law.  Do you
> even have a case here?

A case of what?  Content is content, and firmware is just as much 
separate and independent content whether it is installed on the fly or 
already in ROM.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com