Request for free-distributable Broadcom's (G|LP)-PHY firmware

[Rafał Miłecki]

W dniu 21 października 2010 17:21 użytkownik Dan Williams
<dcbw at redhat.com> napisał:
> On Thu, 2010-10-21 at 00:11 +0200, Rafał Miłecki wrote:
>> W dniu 20 października 2010 23:50 użytkownik Henry Ptasinski
>> <henryp at broadcom.com> napisał:
>> > Sorry for the delay in responding.  We are exploring what is possible but
>> > for the moment the answer is no. At present our focus is on providing the
>> > best open source solution we can for 4313, 43224, 43225, 4329 and future
>> > chips sets.
>>
>> Thanks for answer.
>>
>> Please, can you make totally sure person responsible for this gets it
>> totally right? I believe it's very important.
>>
>> The easiest step for you, which we still would appreciate is really
>> trivial one. It's *not* about writing any code, *not* about releasing
>> anything new. It's just about releasing in under friendly license.
>> This firmware is already available, we have access to it, we use it.
>> The problem is that distributions can not ship it.
>>
>> If you let me use simplification: all we need as first nice step is
>> Broadcom to say: "You can use it".
>
> That's not enough to allow Fedora to ship it.  We'd need a clear license
> from Broadcom (ex the existing Intel or Marvell firmware licenses)
> before Fedora could feel comfortable about shipping it legally in all
> jurisdictions.
>
> http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/dwmw2/linux-firmware.git;a=blob;f=LICENCE.mwl8k;h=3224e1bbfba8ccd1d980f57eb88378f20bb2d146;hb=HEAD
> http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/dwmw2/linux-firmware.git;a=blob;f=LICENCE.libertas;h=1fd8766c26a170b50605455ae6f54b607baa12cf;hb=HEAD
>
> There's an existing Broadcom license in linux-firmware.git, and it *may*
> be OK, but it's really, really long and given that other major companies
> adopted the "shorter is better" approach, it's hard to believe that all
> the existing Broadcom license text is actually needed.

Few months later, is there any progress? Can we expect:

1) Easier licensing of currently provided firmware (see Fedore case)
2) Firmware for LP-PHY devices
?

-- 
Rafał