Re: Atheros and rt2x00 driver

[Lee Revell]

On Wed, 2005-08-17 at 19:11 +0100, Daniel J Blueman wrote:
> Ralink Tech (www.ralink.com.tw) took a design decision to incorporate
> the firmware into an EEPROM on-board, allowing their driver to be
> GPL'd 

Binary only firmware and firmware loading is perfectly compatible with
the GPL, as long as the vendor includes a license to redistribute the
firmware.  The problem was that vendors were distributing the firmware
embedded in the driver code as a big hex string, without a separate
license, which made the firmware fall under the GPL, which make the
whole kernel undistributable as there's no source code for the firmware.

Lee

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/