Fedora Freedom and linux-libre

[Les Mikesell]

jeff wrote:
> 
>>>>> Well, Red Hat added it to the Linux kernel before the "Derived from 
>>>>> Proprietary Sources" line was added. How do you know Red Hat 
>>>>> doesn't have or never had the source to it? I don't think they have 
>>>>> it, but I've never seen them say they didn't.
>>>>
>>>> Can you provide the commit ID showing that it was Red Hat that
>>>> committed it to the upstream Linux kernel source tree? I'm actually
>>>> curious to have a look at that commit.
>>>
>>> Somewhere else in this thread, jeff wrote:
>>>  > The "GPLing" of the driver (MODULE_LICENSE("GPL")) and the 
>>> inclusion of
>>>  > a chunk of non-free code occurred in commit [1]
>>>  > 2d8a9d3fd19147c808aa39ddc69a743d1c90f199.
>>>  >
>>>  > The commit shows David S. Miller (davem at redhat.com) and Jeff Garzik
>>>  > (jgarzik at mandrakesoft.com) as authors.
>>>  >
>>>  > [1] git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tglx/history.git
>>>
>>> -Jeff
>>>
>>
>> Per the debian discussion on this topic at 
>> http://wiki.debian.org/KernelFirmwareLicensing this was fixed in this 
>> commit:
>> http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=49cabf49abd7676d026a61baabf5aae9337a82be;hp=9beb1d587f690d5b2f9087f8f10c0ff9f6b66886 
>>
>> (i.e. the GPL indication removed).
> 
> But that is simply wrong. Did you go to your own URL? It doesn't remove 
> *a single line*. It just added (in 2005):
> 
> + *     Derived from proprietary unpublished source code,
> + *     Copyright (C) 2000-2003 Broadcom Corporation.
> + *
> + *     Permission is hereby granted for the distribution of this firmware
> + *     data in hexadecimal or equivalent format, provided this copyright
> + *     notice is accompanying it.
> 

I guess I didn't look that closely. Maybe the GPL line was removed 
earlier and this put in (back?) the permission to distribute.  I just 
pasted the link from the debian discussion where they quoted the earlier 
one that said it was GPL and then said this commit solved their problem 
with it.  See the tg3 section of the 1st link I posted.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com