On Tuesday 21 November 2006 08:58, James Oakley wrote:
On Sunday 19 November 2006 7:08 am, John Andersen wrote:
I'm surprised that Ubuntu distributes it, since it's not really legal unless they have explicit permission.
I'm not so sure.
a) You purchased the device. b) They provide free drivers on their web site.
All bcm43xx-fwcutter does is put a and b together.
I'm talking about the firmware, not bcm43xx-fwcutter. People have mentioned that Ubuntu distributes the *firmware*, which is not allowed without explicit permission.
Yes, I understand that, but the firmware is freely available from the card manufacturer's website, and would be more current than anything SUSE or Ubuntu distributed anyway. Perhaps ubuntu HAS explicit permission, or a loophole in the law due to non US ownership. Selling you a card, but denying you software to run it MIGHT be considered illegal in some countries. Sadly, not the US. Side issue: ATI has rpms on their site. Inside these RPM it says they were built by SUSE. Yet you can't get them from opensuse, and you have to go fetch them. Probably the same with Nvidia, although I haven't checked. Yet you can get Acrobat directly off the SUSE disks (not-oss). Same with RealPlayer. There seems to be this strange division on what Suse chooses to include and what they don't. The end result is punitive to the end-user. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen