Re: [gNewSense-users] KFV: Detecting sourceless firmware

[Markus Laire]

Karl Goetz wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-04-11 at 09:03 +0300, Markus Laire wrote:
> > It seems that the current way of doing KFV-work by checking only the 
> > license often leaves sourceless firmware marked as "free".
> >
> > Since there are only "few" files which have firmware compared to all 
> > files whose license needs to be checked, it might be best to just 
> > continue this way, and when licenses of all files have been checked, to 
> > separately detect files which contain firmware and then check whether 
> > they are sourceless or not.
>
> I disagree.
> sourceless firmware being marked free is usually a mistake of someone
> not checking the licence completely - they see "GPL" and move on.
>
> Although it wont hurt to recheck firmware at the end, i dont think it
> should be deliberately left out now.

There are also cases like
http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Kernel/Ubuntu-hardy-linux-2-6-24-12-22--drivers--media--dvb--ttpci--av7110-hw-c
where the license itself is normal "GPLv2 or later" and as such 
completely free. Only by checking the whole file and not only the 
license can one see that it contains firmware for which we don't have 
source, and so the file is undistributable.

What I meant was that person checking the licenses could mark the file 
as "free" if the license is free, even if the file might contain 
sourceless firmware which would make it undistributable.

Because detecting firmware should IMO be done by a script and not 
manually. (Doing it manually would IMO waste too much time.)

> > Detecting firmware should probably be done by a script (is there already 
> > such a script which was used to detect firmware in gNS 1.0 ?)
>
> There is a script in svn.
>
> > Also the table at
> > http://wiki.debian.org/KernelFirmwareLicensing
> > and the file-list
> > http://svn.gnewsense.svnhopper.net/gnewsense/builder/trunk/firmware/firmware-removed
> > might be useful.
> >
> > Also, should this be added to "Current projects" page as an additional 
> > project so that it's not forgotten?
> >
> > Any thoughts?

--
Markus Laire