On Sun, 2008-06-01 at 18:17 +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:That's an interesting question, which has concerned me in the past. There are certainly those who would claim that the distribution _is_ a collective work, and not just 'mere aggregation on a volume of a storage or distribution medium'. Which poses interesting questions. I think you might _just_ about get away with arguing to the contrary, as long as you never refer to the distribution as a collective work which is copyrightable in its own right, or try to put a EULA on it or anything like that. At least it's _slightly_ more excusable in that case than what we were talking about before. Again, there's no definitive answer until/unless it comes to court. But there's no _guarantee_ that a court would rule that what we're doing is OK, even though it's a long-standing and universally accepted practice. You can't apply reductio ad absurdum and declare that the whole 'collective work' part of §2 doesn't exist just because it might lead to a _really_ surprising conclusion. You may only include it in a GPL'd project if you can distribute the source code in the preferred form for editing -- unless you claim that the tightly intertwined combination of driver and firmware is "mere aggregation on a volume of a storage medium", which many would say it blatantly is not. If, on the other hand, we have a separate repository where stuff only has to be 'redistributable', then that would be OK even without source. I'm working on reducing the technical barriers to having a separate repository, to the point where it becomes silly not to do it like that. -- dwmw2 --
| Arjan van de Ven | Re: Linux 2.6.26-rc4 |
| Greg KH | [GIT PATCH] driver core patches against 2.6.24 |
| Ilpo Järvinen | Re: [bug] stuck localhost TCP connections, v2.6.26-rc3+ |
| James Bottomley | Re: Integration of SCST in the mainstream Linux kernel |
git: | |
| Gerrit Renker | [PATCH 27/37] dccp: Integration of dynamic feature activation - part 2 (server side) |
| David Miller | Re: [GIT]: Networking |
| Jarek Poplawski | [PATCH] pkt_sched: Destroy gen estimators under rtnl_lock(). |
| Evgeniy Polyakov | Re: [BUG] New Kernel Bugs |
