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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.
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
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.