From alsa-devel-owner@alsa.jcu.cz  Sun Mar  7 21:11:17 1999
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To: alsa-devel@alsa.jcu.cz
From: sharkey@ale.physics.sunysb.edu
Subject: Re: ALSA Soundcard Vendor Information 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 07 Mar 1999 20:28:53 +0100."
             <19990307202853.G22312@ruhr-uni-bochum.de> 
Date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 05:11:04 +0900
Reply-To: alsa-devel@alsa.jcu.cz
Sender: alsa-devel-owner@alsa.jcu.cz
Precedence: list

> Note that if you include Firmware in the Alsa distribution, it will be
> difficult for me to comply to the GPL when distributing ALsa, because I
> can't copy the source of the firmware, as the GPL requests. So non-free
> Firmware should probably be distributed and made available outside of Alsa.
> 
> (I have experienced with such issue, as I'm a distribution builder. In
> Debian, this was the very reason why KDE couldn't be shipped, for example).

I don't think this is a fair comparison.  KDE links to QT.  That's pretty
different than ALSA distributing firmware, IMO.

When you link a library to an application, the code for that library becomes
part of that application.  You can trace through the code of KDE with a
debugger and say at any point in the execution that the code being executed
is either in the KDE part or in the QT part but the execution will flip back
and forth repeatedly.  The execution of KDE is inextricably intertwined with
QT.

But firmware is quite different.  It isn't linked in with ALSA.  ALSA runs
on the system CPU(s) and is completely independent from any firmware.  The
firmware runs only on the sound card not the system.  I've always felt that
firmware is more like hardware than software.  But I guess that's why they
call it firmware, it isn't really either.

So I don't see why there should be a conflict.  If all the code in ALSA is
GPL, but we include a separately licensed binary file which could be used to
flash some eeprom on the card or something like that, then there's no conflict
of licenses the way there was with KDE, because there's no linking involved.

As a whole, ALSA might then fail to meet the DFSG.  I don't think that would
stop the inclusion of ALSA into Debian, though.  It should be a trivial job
to separtate ALSA into to packages.  The main component, alsa.deb, and the
optional non-free component, alsa-nonfree.deb.

Eric

