hi everyone, the current situation concerning firmware blobs and dfsg-freeness is a bit sad, among other things because there really isn't too much we can do about it in the short run. so how about some practical proposal that we can actually implement in a reasonable timeframe that gets us in a better position to deal with this in the long run? my idea would be:
firmware blobs without source get put into non-free, firmware blobs with source but without the necessary free tools to generate the image end up in contrib, firmware which is cryptographically signed and can tehrefore not be modified goes to non-free. we relax the "main" requirements insofar that a package that depends on another package in non-free may stay in main (and doesn't have to go to contrib), if the contents of that other package are not executed or used on the main/host computer'c cpu, but on some additional hardware. (this would of course need to be phrased a bit better, but you get the idea). this way everyone could still use their computer (if using contrib and non-free), and not every other package will end up in contrib. main will contain less non-free code than it does now, end non-free code is marked as such... cu robert -- Robert Lemmen http://www.semistable.com
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