Embedded Linux and the GPL
Posted Jun 10, 2003 22:54 UTC (Tue) by
jeff@uclinux.org (guest, #8024)
In reply to:
Embedded Linux and the GPL by JoeBuck
Parent article:
Embedded Linux and the GPL
Yes, even the smallest (uC)linux embedded systems need a root filesystem
and do support loadable modules. Most practical embedded systems need to
do that, the drivers for systems at the top end of the price curve (in this case
802.11a/g, b was last year's game) are written for hardware which is proprietary.
In the case of the Linksys device, the wlan driver is a _huge_ module, which is
probabily what people want.
./lib/modules/2.4.5/kernel/drivers/net/wl:
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 301701 Mar 5 15:49 wl.o
The embedded vendors know they can sign the NDA and get it from
Broadcom if they have a customer who will buy piles of chips, BTW.
The only way to deal with this stuff is to to be polite and point it out,
although the real question is why didn't the vendor who did the work
for Linksys deal with these GPL issues for them and make even a simple
tarball of the Free components available. However, there is no reason
to think you could expect to get source to the whole product, nor should
you expect to!
J
(
Log in to post comments)
