Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TECH TOPIC] Firmware signing

[Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 08:00:00AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> You're not out of the woods with this, though: the licence of the
> firmware must permit arbitrary redistribution (and we've seen some that
> don't), so it still has to be released under a freely redistributable
> licence.  And, obviously, there's a greyer area for Linux Specific
> firmware, but the above applies in the general case.
> 
> Distributions, like Debian, which have a definition for what they
> consider to be "free software" may obviously conclude that binary blobs
> don't satisfy that definition and therefore must be confined to the
> non-free part of the distribution.  We can certainly continue to ship
> firmware separately as a courtesy for Debian to prevent the hardship of
> having to banish the whole kernel to non-free

(Or filter out the blobs.)

For the record, this point (that firmware *itself* is not Free Software)
was the only one I meant when I gave "licensing" as a reason to not
compile in firmware.  Feel free to continue the argument about the
legality of a bzImage containing firmware blobs if you like, but that's
not the point I was making.

- Josh triplett