On Sun, 2008-06-01 at 18:17 +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
That's an interesting question, which has concerned me in the past.
There are certainly those who would claim that the distribution _is_ a
collective work, and not just 'mere aggregation on a volume of a storage
or distribution medium'. Which poses interesting questions.
I think you might _just_ about get away with arguing to the contrary, as
long as you never refer to the distribution as a collective work which
is copyrightable in its own right, or try to put a EULA on it or
anything like that. At least it's _slightly_ more excusable in that case
than what we were talking about before.
Again, there's no definitive answer until/unless it comes to court. But
there's no _guarantee_ that a court would rule that what we're doing is
OK, even though it's a long-standing and universally accepted practice.
You can't apply reductio ad absurdum and declare that the whole
'collective work' part of §2 doesn't exist just because it might lead to
a _really_ surprising conclusion.
You may only include it in a GPL'd project if you can distribute the
source code in the preferred form for editing -- unless you claim that
the tightly intertwined combination of driver and firmware is "mere
aggregation on a volume of a storage medium", which many would say it
blatantly is not.
If, on the other hand, we have a separate repository where stuff only
has to be 'redistributable', then that would be OK even without source.
I'm working on reducing the technical barriers to having a separate
repository, to the point where it becomes silly not to do it like that.
--
dwmw2
--
