On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 02:36:03AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote: > In the firmware case, the choice is rather different. At present, the > choice is not between free firmware or non-free firmware. The choice is > between non-free firmware on disk or non-free firmware in ROM. Putting > drivers in contrib penalises the former, and as a result implicitly > encourages the latter.
Note that this is strictly equivalent to the old netscape argument: does the absence of any useful free web browser, mean that netscape should not be 'penalised'? (Our answer was 'no') > So, a couple of questions: > > a) Does having these drivers in contrib benefit either (i) our users In the most basic sense, yes. One of the significant purposes of contrib is to say "If you are building a CD without non-free stuff on it, then you can also drop all this other stuff because it won't be any use to you". You also need to turn this question around and ask it the other way: does having these drivers in contrib actually hurt anything? -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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