On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 09:36:09PM +0200, Adrian von Bidder wrote: > Yodel! > > With the first (?) CfV out now about non-free kernel firmwares: > > I'm not going to vote, sorry. I don't have the time to wade through tons of > mailing list archives, of which 1/3 is repetitions of previously made > statements, 1/3 is presumably flames or close to it, and 1/3 is trivial > corrections, with the few substantial arguments scattered in it... > > In short: did anybody do a reasonably balanced and concise writeup about > what is going on on the firmware front regarding > - what are the important arguments and counter-arguments? > - who supports which options?
More information can be found at the start of : http://wiki.debian.org/KernelFirmwareLicensing Including the last draft at a consensual GR proposal following Frederik's original proposal, as well as a draft of the position statement by the debian-kernel team regarding these issues. As i understand, the proposal currently under vote, namely the one from Don Armstrong, is basically a no-op reaffirming our commitment to the current wording of the SC, namely that firmware code is indeed to be considered a program, and affected by the DFSG. Of the remaining proposals under vote, only 2 have reached enough seconds, and need to be considered. These are : 1) The proposal of the kernel team (and hopefully the RM and d-i team will join in with the final version of it), which have us remove from etch all firmware which are non-distributable, but keep those firmwares which are otherwise non-free, as well as those who lack a license file, and are thus implicitly under the GPL, but lack source. This is a commitment for etch, and the kernel team hopes that this will be solved for etch+1. 2) The proposal made by Josselin, which basically proposes that we don't require the source code for firmwares 'as long as there are no other technical means to install and run the Debian system on these devices', which is a longer lasting proposal, since it may extend to etch+1 and beyond. (I feel that in the end both proposals are mostly identic, except that the first one is explicitly mentioning etch, and that the second one is more long termed. Josselin, do you think you could reword your proposal as an amendment to the final draft based on Frederik's proposal, instead of the now defunct proposal from Steve). I hope this clarifies things for you and others. Friendly, Sven Luther -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]