Reverse engineering binary firmware

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Mar  4, 2009, Richard M Stallman <rms at gnu.org> wrote:

>     e100 might be a simpler task, and nearly as useful: there's some
>     indication in the driver that the processor that runs the microcode is
>     8086, the microcode snippets are small (limited to 134 32-bit words),
>     and a very large number of Intel chipsets are bundled with network
>     interfaces that require this microcode.

> What license is this released under?

The entire file drivers/net/e100.c is under this license, no exceptions
noted:

  Intel PRO/100 Linux driver
  Copyright(c) 1999 - 2006 Intel Corporation.

  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
  under the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License,
  version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation.


>     Another more challenging piece of firwmare is that for Broadcom Everest
>     network cards, bnx2x driver.  It's a pretty large, often-changing chunk
>     of (IIRC MIPS-targeted) management firmware.  I have no idea of how
>     widely deployed it is.

> What license is this released under?

drivers/net/bnx2x_init_values.h doesn't have copyright notices or
licensing terms.  In the Linux community, this means the license is
supposed to be GPLv2.

Furthermore, I suppose this file was split out of bnx2x_init.h, that
says:

/* bnx2x_init.h: Broadcom Everest network driver.
 *
 * Copyright (c) 2007-2008 Broadcom Corporation
 *
 * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 * the Free Software Foundation.

just like all other bnx2x* files in drivers/net, except for
bnx2x_link.c and bnx2x_link.h, that say:

/* Copyright 2008 Broadcom Corporation
 *
 * Unless you and Broadcom execute a separate written software license
 * agreement governing use of this software, this software is licensed to you
 * under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2, available
 * at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html (the "GPL").
 *
 * Notwithstanding the above, under no circumstances may you combine this
 * software in any way with any other Broadcom software provided under a
 * license other than the GPL, without Broadcom's express prior written
 * consent.


-- 
Alexandre Oliva           http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Gandhi
Be Free! -- http://FSFLA.org/   FSF Latin America board member
Free Software Evangelist      Red Hat Brazil Compiler Engineer