Freecom violates GPL

[Jan Kiszka]

Armijn Hemel wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 09:59 -0500, Thomas Charron wrote:
>> On Jan 14, 2008 5:29 PM, smirnoff onice <zddog_nl at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>  Yep, and an answer on the freecom forum too...progress?
>>> http://forum.freecompromo.com/viewtopic.php?t=3441
>>> Thanks all (but not over yet)
>>   This is what I don't quite understand.  Why are they having a hard
>> time separating out their proprietary software from the GPLed
>> software.  From a configuration standpoint, the difficulty doesn't
>> make much sense, as I highly doubt anyone would have proprietary code
>> sitting side by side and intertwined with an operating environment.
> 
> Simple: Freecom doesn't make their own devices, they just resell ODM
> devices. They don't have their own OS engineers. So, the real problem is
> upstream *their* supply chain, where it has to be solved. Knowing how
> ODM companies work the whole seperation will be, ehr, a challenge :-P
> 

I started analyzing their repos, and as the situation currently looks
like, the biggest issue they have is with the binary-blobbed WLAN
driver. User land is currently "only" missing some source packages for
things like wpa_supplicant or the mtdtools.

The kernel sources they provide are from Marvell, patched to support the
not-yet-mainlined ARM subarch 88W8618 - all bits are nicely distributed
under GPL. But the WLAN driver for this platform is proprietary, kept
out of tree, probably due to the "usual" reasons ("FCC rules demand to
protect the hardware against the user." "No one is shall see what
patents we violate.").

But Freecom delivered that binary, and now the question is if _they_
were allowed to stuff a non-GPLed driver like this into the kernel.
Can't tell, IANAL.

However, technically this ******* wlandrv.ko is what currently blocks
any kernel modification on the Musicpal without loosing important
functionality (interfacing the display is another topic, but I may have
just missed the related code so far, and it should be far easier
reverse-engineerable than wifi).

Jan

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