On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 03:31:58PM +0200, Alessandro Polverini wrote:
On Thu, 2006-09-28 at 14:32 +0200, Stephan Seitz wrote:a) Get the sources of the firmware;b) Get a permission to distribute the firmware (it can’t be part of a file under an open licence like GPL) in a separate file and package it for non-free;I'll reply with the words of Marco d'Itri[1] on the subject, whom I completely agree with: --- Firmwares are an essential part of any modern computer, and it is an annoying but currently hard to change fact of life that we lack the source for almost all of them.
Then you can’t distribute these firmwares within the GPL driver sources. You can only get the permission to distribute the firmware outside the driver. In Debian this means, you can put it in non-free.
The closed-source nvidia drivers are in non-free, no firmware is available for the Intel wireless cards like 2915abg within Debian. I don’t know if nobody cares about it or if there is no permission to distribute it.
Even if Debian stopped distributing sourceless firmwares users would continue to use them, either on a flash chip or by downloading and installing them on their file systems.
Nobody wants to stop Debian to distribute such firmware in non-free, but Debian needs the permission to distribute it. If the firmware is part of a GPL driver, then this is a licence violation. If the firmware has no separate licence, no copyright and the vendor won’t give you the permission to distribute it, then simply you can’t.
Instead this would push the less technically competent users toward other distributions, whose commitment to free software is usually less strong than our own.
Debian will not show much commitment to free software if it distributes firmware without source (or without permission) in main. Debian is about free software, not about making your life easier in every situation.
Shade and sweet water!
Stephan
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