On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 02:36:03AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote: > It's becomingly increasingly common for hardware to require firmware to > be loaded by the device driver on boot, rather than containing it in > ROM. This is unfortunate, because in most cases the firmware is > non-free. As a result, a naive application of policy suggests that > drivers which require this firmware should appear in contrib.
... Apart from the practical implications and organisation of a "work-around", I would like to understand exactly the problem. I don't feel that I have a fully clear understanding of the actual main motivation for not allowing these non-free firmware in main. I see 2 possible motivations (and maybe there are much more): * all code (and thus also driver code) needs to be DFSG-free, for the purpose of allowing study, modfication, unlimited distribution, ... While this seems an obvious reasoning, I have the impression from the debate that we are _not_ aiming at fundamentally replacing this non-free firmware with free firmware which would allow study, modification, .... We are merely looking at practical ways to continue to supply this non-free firmware to the users, but in a way that is not violation the DFSG. I don't feel fully at ease with the policy of banning all non-free firmware or even drivers that would need to load non-free firmware, if the ultimate goal is not to promote and replace them by free firmware. * we are trying to avoid by all means the very painfull situation where the free distribution of Debian main as a whole is blocked by some legal dispute over distribution of firmware in disrespect of the license that was placed on it by the Copyright holder of that code. This seems a very important reason to avoid any and all non-free code in main. But if the license from the Copyright holder of the non-free firmware allows unmodified binary distribution, then this argument is not immediately applicable. I don't have a position yet, first trying to understand exactly the problem. Thanks, Peter