Fromm the license (Hauppauge-Firmware): (ii) copy and distribute the Firmware to your end-users, but only under a license agreement with terms at least as restrictive as those contained in Hauppauge's END-USER FIRMWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT If you are not the final manufacturer or vendor of a computer system or firmware program incorporating the Firmware, then you may transfer a copy of the Firmware, including any related documentation (modified or unmodified) to your recipient for use in accordance with the terms of this Agreement, provided such recipient agrees to be fully bound by the terms hereof. You shall not otherwise assign, sublicense, lease, or in any other way transfer or disclose Firmware to any third party. You may not, nor may you assist any other person or entity to modify, translate, convert to another programming language, decompile, reverse engineer, or disassemble any portion of the Firmware or otherwise attempt to derive source code from any object code modules of the Firmware or any internal data files generated by the Firmware. Your rights to redistribute the Firmware shall be contingent upon your installation of this Agreement in its entirety in the same directory as the Firmware. E.g., Debian redistributes the package from its servers: http://packages.debian.org/sid/all/firmware-ivtv/download And linux-firmware supplies some of the files in the package (v4l-cx25840.fw).
Some potential sticky points: "If you are not the final manufacturer or vendor of a computer system or firmware program incorporating the Firmware" - are we? And if so, does that mean there is no license? The wording isn't really clear - the previous paragraph just grants a license "subject to the terms of this Agreement" without that qualification, but then the next paragraph adds it. "recipient for use in accordance with the terms of this Agreement, provided such recipient agrees to be fully bound by the terms hereof." I don't believe we document that those we distribute files to agree to be fully bound by the terms of this agreement. The mirrors are publicly accessible websites - anybody can just download files off of them. "Your rights to redistribute the Firmware shall be contingent upon your installation of this Agreement in its entirety in the same directory as the Firmware." The text of this agreement is not installed in the same directory as the Firmware, either on the mirrors, or on the final end-user system. If somebody can point to discussion on debian-legal/etc that touches on these points, I'd be interested.
This is the only discussion I have found: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=411617 Seem that they didn't analyze the redistribution issue in depth.
It's no longer restricted in tree: 11 Feb 2013; Doug Goldstein <cardoe@gentoo.org> ivtv-firmware-20080701.ebuild: Remove RESTRICT=mirror, upstream is no longer around. 11 Feb 2013; Doug Goldstein <cardoe@gentoo.org> ivtv-firmware-20080701.ebuild: Switch to Gentoo mirrors for SRC_URI since upstream's site is gone
