Bug#574158: firmware licenses never displayed
On Tuesday 16 March 2010, Joey Hess wrote:
> 3. Provide some way for firmware debs to communicate to d-i that they
> have a license the user needs to see, and have check-missing-firmware
> display these licenses before the firmware is ever used.
This is the option that I have had in the back of my mind for some time.
I think for really structural support of firmware, we could repackage it
like we do for kernel modules and include meta data (partially?
automatically generated) about the deb something was taken from + licence
requirements.
That would also allow to e.g. skip old versions of firmware.
My personal opinion is that it should actually be quite OK to include
non-free firmware *udebs* on (CD) images as long as
- the licence in no way limits distribution;
- we never allow use of any non-free firmware without explicit ack
by the user.
The *debs* should IMO always be either downloaded from a mirror (using
standard apt-install) with fallback support for installing them from an
external medium.
Under those conditions I think the project might be persuaded to accept
inclusion of firmware in D-I images and on CDs.
We should of course keep support for loading firmware that does not match
these criteria from external media.
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