Debian Developers are employed at a wide variety of companies, some of which ship products that depend on proprietary firmware blobs.
I'm wondering if there is any sense talking to some of these project members to gain at least an understanding of why certain firmware can't be freed. Intel comes to mind with the wifi firmware, and CPU microcode. The goal would be to see if a dialog can be established with a hope that by understanding why certain firmware isn't free, we can perhaps work with the organization to help remove any blockers, and eventually remove dependencies on proprietary blobs. Obviously this would only work if said project members are willing, but I can't see how this could hurt. e.g. - Has anyone ever spoken to Keith Packard (on the TC) about why Intel can't free their blobs? As an aside, how are certain wifi chipsets "FSF blessed"? Is it because they keep any firmware on non-volatile storage (meaning no blobs have to be delivered by OS) and not field upgradable, or is it because they somehow provide sourcecode for the firmware, which distros are free to compile into "free blobs"? Thanks, -Brian _______________________________________________ Fsf-collab-discuss mailing list Fsf-collab-discuss@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fsf-collab-discuss