The ipw3945 project [LWN.net]

The ipw3945 project

Posted Mar 2, 2006 14:55 UTC (Thu) by kmccarty (subscriber, #12085)
In reply to: The ipw3945 project by gypsumfantastic
Parent article: The ipw3945 project

I assume that issue of microkernel blobs being distributed with (not LINKED with) the kernel is now a non-issue? Except maybe Debian, I dunno.

Even in Debian, people appear to be perfectly happy to include these firmware binary blobs in non-free, as long as the license to distribute them makes sense. (For instance, a binary blob licensed under GPL is useless since the GPL specifically requires such binaries to be accompanied with "the complete corresponding machine-readable source code" when distributed. A BSD-type license would be OK though.) The only major remaining issue seems to be how to make these non-free packages available to the Debian Installer in cases where they are needed by required hardware.

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The ipw3945 project

Posted Mar 2, 2006 21:22 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I'm amused by the idea of having it on the card's driver disk. I mean, it has to be there for the Windows drivers, and they could just split it out into a separate file in some useful standard format (like ihex). Of course, that's kind of annoying (since you'd have to swap CDs mid-install), but I like the idea of needing a binary file that can be used on any platform, architecture, etc.