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by ric2b 249 days ago
No, software licensing often gets in the way.
1 comments
fsflover 249 days ago
How does the licensing affect firmware blobs?
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jrochkind1 249 days ago
They are also software that is licensed?
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fsflover 249 days ago
AFAIK you can use and reverse engineer the firmware blobs on any OS, free or not.
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thayne 249 days ago
Reverse engineer? Probably. As long as there aren't patents involved. And that is what the librephone project aims to do, from what I understand.

But the binary blobs are protected by copyright, so you need a license to use them.

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jrochkind1 249 days ago
Legally, you mean? In the US? Interested in more info on this.
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M95D 249 days ago
Sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

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jrochkind1 249 days ago
That doesn't make sense to me, extracting/copying a firmware blob is not clean-room design. It would only be clean-room design, as the article you link to explains, if you constructed it yourself from scratch based on the functionality you understand it should have. But ok!
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devmor 249 days ago
I wonder if it's one of those situations where the potential for legal system abuse is a chilling effect.
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fsflover 249 days ago
Can you elaborate?
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devmor 249 days ago
Such as when it's technically legal to do something as long as you do it a certain way, but the interested parties may not believe that you did it correctly and will bury you in legal discovery requests that financially ruin you or force you to stop.

Or they sue anyways hoping for a favorable ruling that changes the interpretation of the law (Oracle v. Google for a famous example of this)

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