[alsa-devel] alsa-firmware licensing

[Takashi Iwai]

At Mon, 07 Jan 2008 11:41:21 +0100,
Clemens Ladisch wrote:
> 
> Tim Jackson wrote:
> > b) More worryingly, the Emagic EMI 2|6 firmware appears to be under a 
> > "license" which prohibits ANY redistribution. Quoting from 
> > emi_26_62/license.txt (my emphasis):
> > 
> > "The firmware contained herein is Copyright (c) 1999-2002 Emagic
> > as an unpublished work. This notice does not imply unrestricted
> > or public access to this firmware which is a trade secret of Emagic,
> > and which ***may not be reproduced, used, sold or transferred to
> > any third party without Emagic's written consent.***"
> 
> The emi firmware files are copies of linux/drivers/usb/misc/emi26_fw.h
> and emi62_fw_*.h.  emi26_fw.h contains three copies of this "license",
> but only the first one contains this paragraph which is missing in
> license.txt:
> 
> | Permission is hereby granted for the distribution of this firmware 
> | image as part of a Linux or other Open Source operating system kernel 
> | in text or binary form as required. 
> 
> I've added this paragraph to license.txt.
> 
> > Does the ALSA project have special authorisation ("written consent") to 
> > distribute this?
> 
> Well, I'd guess the alsa-firmware package is part of Linux.

And Linux kernel is under GPL v2, so it must be OK.  It'd be better to
add the note that this firmware data is copied from the linux kernel
tree and show the kernel license (GPLv2) explicitly for emi2|6 stuff,
together with the original copyright of the driver source code.

I think other firmwares copied from the kernel tree (maestro3, ymfpci,
etc) should include the similar note, too.

Clemens, could you add that?


Thanks,

Takashi