Slashdot Mirror
Theo de Raadt On Firmware Activism
An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has an insightful interview with OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt, discussing their recent activism to try and open up wireless chipsets. In the interview, Theo discusses what has been accomplished so far, the difficulties involved, and why such efforts are important to all free and open source operating systems."
The legal status of the official ISOs and artwork do not change the fact that the OS itself is 100% free.
You can make your own ISOs and distribute them, do a network install (which, last time I did it, required just one floppy image and was very easy).
It's all similar to Red Hat not allowing you to call copies of the official CD Red Hat, or vendors not releasing the latest version of their software under a free license. It doesn't make other distributions of the same software non-free.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It's actually much more the other way around, but I see why you're confused.
The BSD license permits the use of the covered software in closed-source projects (it just mandates an acknowledgement). The GPL does not permit this - if you link with a GPLed work, the result must be GPLed, too (at least if you redistribute it).
Now, for the kernels, the situation is a quite different. The BSDs are very puritan in that they only allow BSD licensed code in the kernel, whereas Linux is more pragmatic in that it allows a mixture of GPL, MPL, closed-source, and basically whatever you come up with.
This is not to say that it wouldn't be legal for you to link a proprietary module to a BSD kernel and distribute it (provided that the proprietary part can be redistributed). It's just that the BSDs won't do this in their official distros. Many Linux distros also won't ship non-free kernel modules. And they couldn't legally compile a GPL incompatible module into the kernel and distribute the result.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
``Instead, I would say that what OpenBSD does would be more like Linus saying that Redhat was the Official CD of Linux.''
That comparison is a very flawed one. OpenBSD is a full OS; Linux is only a kernel. The RedHat CDs include much more than Linux alone, and are composed outside Linus's sphere of influence. Him saying that RedHat is the official CD of Linux would be mostly meaningless.
The firmware that OpenBSD wants is the binary code that gets uploaded into the card and run on the card's onboard CPU.
Thet don't want to obtain that firmware's source. They want distribution rights to include the unchanged firmware in their open-source drivers. That firmware is already "free" to download from the web and extract, or extract from the Windows driver on the CD bundled with the card, but OpenBSD wants to cut to the chase and just have drivers that work first time from their install CD.
Would you please stop this. They are not trying to get the companies to open source their firmware, they can't. The firmware determines the frequency of the wireless chipset, open sourcing it means you can change the frequency, which is illegal in most parts of the world. The OpenBSD developers know this and is therefor NOT trying to get the source code for the firmware, Im sure they wouldn't mind having it, but they know that it is impossible.
What they are trying to do is to have the firmware release under a license, which will enable them to distribute it along with the operating system. They're aren't asking for anything but permission to ship the binary firmware. I am amazed by the number of people not getting this.
Firmware is NOT linked with the linux kernel, so the GPL "mere aggregation" clause applies. Obviously, this is MHO, and this has already generated a LOT of debian-legal discussion.
:-)
YMMV HTH
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/1735
The only exception is if the driver was not developped specifically for Linux (ie somebody ported it) and then it's not considered a derived work. Otherwise any kernel code falls under GPL.
People who don't like that should use BSD instead. It has no such requirements.
Being encumbered with the legal status of the official ISOs and artwork is not 100% free. It's like saying that the governments of thw world are 100% free because some distributions of it are free.
You can get an official OpenBSD CD, mount it, copy everything off it and then burn a bootable CD from those files. No problem. Staying within the stipulated copyright placed on the official CD's.
What you can't legally do, is make a bit perfect image copy of the official CD's to pass around. The layout of the ISO filesystem on the CD has a copyright stipulated on them which prevents copying. Not the files within that ISO filesystem (which constitute the OS install files).
I don't see anything wrong with this. The files are what make up the OS and they are very free.
Hell, why download a ~600MB ISO image, when you can just download about 150MB for i386, then burn it to a CDR with cdrom36.fs as the bootable image? Or network install from floppy36.fs?
The official CD's are pretty neat btw, you can typically boot off any given official CD, onto more than one different architectures. You get cool stickers and insert, cool CDDA clean song and all up what I would consider a collectors item. Plus, you have contributed to the next version of this FANTASTIC OS.
Nothing stops you from downloading the source, building it on your own, stamping the binaries on CDROM and selling it.
Nothing stops you from downloading the binaries, stamping the binaries on CDROM and selling it.
It is the ISO filesystem image that has copyright stipulated, not the files within that ISO filesystem.
The OS is as free as the BSD licence that applies to it.
Nobody said there was anything wring with it, just that it makes OpenBSD conceptually less than 100% free.
No it does NOT! Specifically, only the official ISO CD image is not free to copy. The files within that image (OpenBSD itself) are free to copy.
OpenBSD is not the official CD ISO image, but the official ISO CD image CONTAINS OpenBSD.
OpenBSD is free to copy, the image is not. Just mount the image and extract the files legally! Sheesh.
How hard is this to understand? OpenBSD is as free as the BSD licence against it, but a very specific image of a filesystem, which just happens to also have OpenBSD within it, is not free to copy. OpenBSD and the official image are mutually exclusive things.