OpenWrt One round 2 of 2

[Denver Gingerich]

On Tue, Mar 04, 2025 at 02:51:19PM +1100, DiffieHellman wrote:
> I've reviewed the source candidate and I've found that in the resulting image there are proprietary derivative works of Linux without source code?:
> lib/firmware/airoha:
> EthMD32.dm.bin  EthMD32.DSP.bin
> 
> lib/firmware/mediatek:
> mt7981_rom_patch.bin  mt7981_wa.bin  mt7981_wm.bin  mt7981_wo.bin
> 
> This doesn't seem very GPLv2-compliant, after all, the source code is not complete as it contains proprietary binaries.
> 
> If they are not derivative works, I'm sure you'd be able to delete Linux and still be able to use the software just as well, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Yes, you can delete Linux and use the software, you just need something else to put where Linux used to be.  You could put FreeBSD or NetBSD or other OSes there if you like.  Nothing about these proprietary blobs depends on Linux, nor are these blobs derivative of Linux.

Denver Gingerich
Director of Compliance
Software Freedom Conservancy