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."

Comments

Re:100% Free?

[RAMMS EIN]

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.

Re:Why not?

[Simon Lyngshede]

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.

Anyway...

[hummassa]

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 :-)