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Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 08:13:58 -0800 (PST)
From: christoph hebeisen <heby@heby.de>
To: Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>
cc: discuss@linmodems.org, tytso@MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: Ted's opinium on lucent winmodem issues.
In-Reply-To: <20001204142418.B20997@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.10.10012040747390.10336-100000@defiant.heby.de>
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hi,

> Once in a time, lucent was shipping it as single big module, and that
> module [probably] contained modified serial.c. That was certainly
> wrong, but maybe they are not doing that any more.
> 
> Also, "lets make customer the one who does linking" to work around GPL
> looks wrong also, and you are certainly doing that (with good
> intentions, AFAICS).

i don't see the point - they're providing gpl-ed code in modified form but
under gpl (which is perfectly ok). let's for the moment assume that their
.o file contains only their proprietary code. who can tell them what they
have to provide source for something that contains no free source code at
all? i mean, sure, it's not the best solution ever. but there is no
violation of gpl whatsoever.

i don't exactly know if it's legal (even for the user) to link the
proprietary .o file with the gpl-ed stuff but that's what the user is
doing so you can't sue lucent for it.

of course i agree that we'd rather have the source. but remember: they
might get in trouble with the telecommunication carriers for this. and
with this object file they are providing a driver that runs even with 2.4
kernels (after a few modifications). now which companies do we like best?
the ones that provide no driver for their winmodems whatsoever, the ones
who provide a 2.2.12-20 (or whatever) driver that will at best work with a
forced insmod with other kernels and most probably contains gpl-ed code
which they have modified but not published or the company that provides
the modified gpl-ed stuff plus a proprietary .o file that contains the low
level stuff that they dont want us to touch? i have to say at this point
lucent of all winmodem manufacturers has done the very very best job for
the linux community and we should at least not blame them for it - because
now they aren't violating gpl anymore.

oh, by the way, can anyone tell me the legal difference between what
lucent is doing and what is going on with xfree 4 proprietary modules
which were explicitly designed to keep most of xfree open source but give
the manufacturers the possibility to do the lowlevel stuff without giving
away their specs? ok, it's a dynamic linking process there but as i
mentioned above, lucent doesn't do any linking either.

heby

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Christoph Hebeisen                                            heby@heby.de
4023 Hamilton Hall   SFU   Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6   Canada   (+1 604) 3200161
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