On Tuesday 21 November 2006 11:16 pm, John Andersen wrote:
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.
It does not matter how you got something. If you do not have explicit permission to redistribute you cannot do it. That's applies to anything under copyright. One of the rights granted by the GPL is redistribution, which makes Linux distributions possible.
Perhaps ubuntu HAS explicit permission, or a loophole in the law due to non US ownership.
I doubt Broadcom would give permission to Ubuntu and nobody else. They do allow redistribution of the firmware for the 57xx cards however, which is included right in the Linux kernel.
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.
Those are binary kernel drivers. SUSE does not distribute them: "Novell's Official Position Most developers of the kernel community consider non-GPL kernel modules to be infringing on their copyright. Novell does respect this position, and will no longer distribute non-GPL kernel modules as part of future products. February 9, 2006"
Yet you can get Acrobat directly off the SUSE disks (not-oss). Same with RealPlayer.
Novell has made deals with those companies to allow redistribution.
There seems to be this strange division on what Suse chooses to include and what they don't.
They simply distribute what they are allowed to. -- James Oakley jfunk@funktronics.ca -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org