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Hi Guys,A driver project i am involved with is in a fairly unique situation in the fact that we have a very good relationship with hardware company and we are currently trying to sort out some firmware problems. Some of the newer versions of hardware require firmware to operate, the hardware vendor is willing to place the firmware files for direct download on their website,( instead of being packaged in a windows .sys driver), which is *very* nice of them.
It would be good if we could attach a licence with the firmware that would permit its redistribution with the open source drivers. We are in the position to suggest licences but i think they would probably want a complete licence already done if possible. Are there any existing licences that are usable for binary firmware distribution? Ideally compatibility with debian would be nice as they are one of the strictest distros by trying to keep the code licences pure, is it possible to have binary only compatibility with debian in this way? or is the way to solve things to have a package that pulls the firmware from the vendors website when installing?.
Oh the driver is also going in the kernel so it would be really nice to have out of the box support but i am not sure if this is possible, i know some kernel drivers use "blobs" (binary strings) that contain the firmware for some drivers but this causes political problems with the blobs being non GPL etc. It also depends on the size of the firmware i suspose, we are currently using the kernel firmware loader.
Any ideas and suggestions greatly thanked! Robin -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe. FAQ: www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html