Very Computer

First, let me say that I do not want to start a religious war, so please accept
my apologies if you think that this is the wrong place to ask the wrong
question.

I have an old PMac 7300, with LinuxPPC 1999, now upgraded to 2000, and Ben's
latest kernel. Now I wanted to install an ISDN PCI card (Fritz!card), and from
the mailing lists I got the information that SuSE hacked the drivers to support
the PPC platform.

Fine.

I got a link to ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/ppc/update/BETA, where you can find
RPM's with kernels and modules. There are, however, no kernel _sources_ with the
patched drivers, just Ben's latest kernel. And I _think_ Ben's kernel does not
contain any "new" or ppc specific isdn patches; I checked against 2.2.16 from
kernel.org, and there are just some changes in one single file. Please correct
me if I am wrong.

As I always prefer to build my own kernel (I sometimes have some of my own
patches/test code, and I want to control what goes in it), I asked several times
for the sources, but never got a response.

I think the whole kernel is released unter the GPL, right? And I _think_ the GPL
states (in section 3) that I _must_ have access to the sources? So this is the
longer explanation of the question in the subject line... Again, please correct
me if I am wrong.

I would really appreciate your opinion: Is it correct that I (and everybody
else, of course) should have free access to the sources of any patches to the
Linux/LinuxPPC kernel if a corresponding binary/rpm/whatever is released? And,
if so, is there anything we can do about this?

Thanks, Albrecht.

--
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Dr.-Ing. Albrecht Dre\ss                                     """"           |
| Max-Planck-Institut f\"ur Radioastronomie   |\       /      /o  o\          |
| Abteilung f\"ur Infrarot-Interferometrie    |  \    /      |  /   |         |
| Auf dem H\"ugel 69                          |    \ |        \ ---/          |
| D-53121 Bonn (Germany)          ------------+------+-------------------     |
| Phone (+49) 228 525 319                     |    / |                        |
| Fax   (+49) 228 525 411                     |  /  /                         |

| http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/div/iri                                        |
+-------------- electrical engineers do it with less resistance --------------+

Have you queried SuSE about this yet?  It's possible that the source is in another
directory or that they just overlooked it.  If the source is not available, then
they're not in strict compliance with the GPL, but I doubt that anything sinister
is going on.  I would be interested in SuSE's response.

Ken Quinn
RF Systems Technical Specialist
Beams Division/Linac Group
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Quote:

> I got a link to ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/ppc/update/BETA, where you can find
> RPM's with kernels and modules. There are, however, no kernel _sources_ with the
> patched drivers, just Ben's latest kernel. And I _think_ Ben's kernel does not
> contain any "new" or ppc specific isdn patches; I checked against 2.2.16 from
> kernel.org, and there are just some changes in one single file. Please correct
> me if I am wrong.

It's been a while since I carefully read the GPL, but my understanding
is that it requires that sources be made available, but it doesn't
specify HOW they're to be made available. It's possible you just need to
e-mail SuSE and they'll send you the sources, for instance; or they
might be up on another server. If I'm not mistaken, it'd even be legit
for SuSE to make the source available only on CD-ROM, although only if
they don't charge more than duplication and distribution costs for it.
(They can charge more than that for a whole package, but not for just
the source, as I recall.)

--

http://www.rodsbooks.com
Author of books on Linux & multi-OS configuration

Well he's talking about the SuSE 6.3 BETA. You still won't find SuSE PPC
6.4 on ftp.suse.com (although an SuSE employee promised me at the
LinuxTag2000 that this will change soon and guess what - it didn't)

Marc
--
Spam protection: Remove the "XXX" part for a correct e-mail address.

And if something is publically available it counts as release.
In this sense, you have to provide the source to released BETAs (and
released alphas for that matter. :) )

I also suggest querying Suse about it.
        Bernhard
--
Professional Service around Free Software                (intevation.net)  
The FreeGIS Project                                         (freegis.org)
Association for a Free Informational Infrastructure            (ffii.org)

Duno, I see 6.3 and 6.4 side by side with BETA if you move one dir up.
What makes you think he's talking about the 6.3 beta?

Anyway, putting the binary on a FTP site for download constitutes
distribution (which is what the GPL applies to; 'release' is not a term
that occurs in the GPL from what I recall).

So, if SuSE distributes binaries of the Linux kernel without offering
access to the source, they are in violation of a very basic provision of
the GPL. Not that I'm surprised here, in my book SuSE is in violation of
the GPL in a number or more subtle
points for some time.

I don't know what kernel you got there, but I've found a promising diff
at ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/ppc/update/BETA/devel/kernel/benh/. If
that's the one used to generate the kernel image, they're fine,
technically.

<rant>
I've looked at the kernelpatches directory and find more reason to gripe
- were these patches ever submitted to the PPC maintainer or
linuxppc-dev, or does SuSE expect us to find those patches by accident
and integrate them? They implemented mouse button emulation for USB
(thanks, I'm glad someone finally did that shortly before it's obsoleted
by the input layer changes) but also added a novel way to pass emulation
keycodes to the ADB mouse code (no thanks, the original adbmouse code
has been in the kernel source since 1997 so why not use it? If it's
better than the previous code, why not post a note to linuxppc-dev
explaining why?). Confusion reigns. Weird kind of parallel universe down
south, eh?
</rant>

Summary: I doubt you are going to be able to nail them on
technicalities, but if that's supposed to be how the spirit of the GPL
works out in practice, good night.

        Michael

You can only find 6.3beta (the iso eval-ppc-6.3-beta.iso) on the SuSE
FTP Server. All other folders only deal with updates.
That's why I was thinking he was actually talking about the 6.3beta.

It's that simple

Marc
--
Spam protection: Remove the "XXX" part for a correct e-mail address.

In that case, cut them no slack. Politely ask for the patches and remind
them of the GPL if necessary.

        Michael

This is just Ben's kernel which you get from his web site
http://ppclinux.apple.com/~benh/...

You can find the patches against a vanilla 2.2.16 kernel on the same server, but
in the directory ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/mantel/.  I guess everyone will
have no problems at all to find them in this obvious place ;-))  Anyway, I will
test them with Ben's kernel...  Maybe Ben or Paul might integrate them in their
tree?

Albrecht.

--
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Dr.-Ing. Albrecht Dre\ss                                     """"           |
| Max-Planck-Institut f\"ur Radioastronomie   |\       /      /o  o\          |
| Abteilung f\"ur Infrarot-Interferometrie    |  \    /      |  /   |         |
| Auf dem H\"ugel 69                          |    \ |        \ ---/          |
| D-53121 Bonn (Germany)          ------------+------+-------------------     |
| Phone (+49) 228 525 319                     |    / |                        |
| Fax   (+49) 228 525 411                     |  /  /                         |

| http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/div/iri                                        |
+-------------- electrical engineers do it with less resistance --------------+

I know where I can get BenH's stuff, or the LinuxPPC kernel sources.
That doesn't help SuSE users looking for source and diffs (and possibly
.config) for the kernel binaries SuSE distributes. A diff against
linux-pmac-stable in the same directory as the kernel image would be
sufficient. The diffs.benh.tar.bz2 which appears to hold a series of
incremental diffs relative to some snapshot of the bitkeeper tree is
_not_.

Quote:> You can find the patches against a vanilla 2.2.16 kernel on the same server, but
> in the directory ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/mantel/.  I guess everyone will
> have no problems at all to find them in this obvious place ;-))  Anyway, I will
> test them with Ben's kernel...  Maybe Ben or Paul might integrate them in their
> tree?

Obvious place indeed. If someone at SuSE would care to send their
patches (against some PPC codebase, not vanilla 2.2.16) to them, they
might consider integrating some changes. Most of these have been posted
on linuxppc-dev by others, or are from BenH's tree as far as I could see
from a first glance. So there may not be much to feed back to the PPC
development branch, but that's hard to tell (or rather guess).

Back to your original question: The change to the ISDN driver appears to
be in the patches.tgz file from your link, try
./patches/isdn-260600.diff (that's one of the two files that contain the
string "Fritz"). These changes indeed aren't in BenH's 2.2.17pre15
source.

For the future: don't hesitate to call or e-mail SuSE tech support about
these things. They should know off the cuff (and tell people that ask
them), I had to look this stuff up myself. Their FTP archive structure
is convoluted enough to make me think twice before I'll play SuSE tech
support again.

        Michael