[CS-FSLUG] wireless NIC - licensing

[Frank Bax]

At 10:22 AM 11/15/04, Josiah Ritchie wrote:

>On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 20:38, Frank Bax wrote:
> >       http://www.monkey.org/openbsd/archive/misc/0411/msg01185.html
> > Over in the OpenBSD-misc mailing  list, we learned this week that Intel 
> has
> > decided against making any changes to the licensing of firmware for
> > wireless nic's.  The bsd folks were not asking for access to source
> > code.  They were asking for the right to freely redistribute the binary
> > code.  As I understand things, without the ability to freely distribute 
> the
> > firmware binaries, the firmware is not be bundled with any
> > distro.  Installation of firmware requires acceptance of a click-through
> > license.
> >       http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/firmware.php?fid=4
> > Apparently folks in several Linux camps (SuSE, Mandrake) do not have a
> > problem with this license.  I'm no legal person, but this license looks 
> scary!
> >
> > The license appears to say that if I'm not the "end user", then the first
> > part must apply.  You agree to never print "Intel" or any trademark they
> > own without their written consent!
> >
> > If I agreed to that license (I didn't) this email (by discussing it) would
> > a violation of it.
>
>I don't know about the name thing, but as far as packaging in a
>distro... Gentoo just tells you where from and to download it and it
>takes care of the rest.


And I'm sure other distro's do the same thing.  My concern is the situation 
where the person doing install (and agreeing to license) is not the 
"end-user" of the software.  My reading of the license is that different 
clauses of the license apply in this situation.

Frank