On Thu, 2015-07-30 at 09:17 -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> Well as you know, we disagree.  To me it reads like 

Thank you. I'm happy enough seeing "to me it reads like", followed by
something I disagree with, rather than a claim of absolute truth.
Especially in a case where we're hypothesising about what a court
*might* rule, and we all know that courts can do entirely insane
things.

That was the reason I jumped in.

I'm still kind of interested in what you think it means in the
paragraph which explicitly refers to identifiable sections of a work
which are "not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably
considered independent and separate works in themselves", and concludes
with the words "to each and every part regardless of who wrote it". 

As I understand your viewpoint so far, you seem to have rendered that
whole paragraph entirely meaningless. But having got to this point I'm
not sure I'm interested *enough* to continue that part of the
conversation :)

> The original question wasn't about that, it was
> whether shipping firmware as part of the kernel source tree would 
> cause potential legal jeopardy for onward distributors.  The answer 
> is no, as you agree above.

In the circumstance where the kernel is considered a joint work and its
authors are considered to have consented to that inclusion, sure.

But estoppel doesn't help if we've pulled in GPL'd code from third
parties (which we have), and if *those* third parties object to the
combination of their code in a way that (as you said we could suppose
for the sake of argument) violates the GPL. Which they might.

In that case, *we* have violated the licence of the third party code
that we pulled in. That doesn't give onward distributors a free pass.

But Tim is right; this discussion is probably not really beneficial.

-- 
dwmw2