On 11 Dec 2004, at 1:39 am, Brian Nelson wrote:
As for whether Debian would actually distribute the firmware blobs in main, I would prefer that we do. It can be a real pain installing Debian on a system in which I have to retrieve the firmware from an external source. It's only hurting the end-user by making them jump through more hoops to install Debian, with no obvious benefit.
Hear hear.
However,there seems to be a strong movement to make Debian 100% free down to thelast bit. Reversing this movement is another much more controversial issue.
If Debian tries to be too rigid, we run a serious risk of consigning ourselves to history, because people just won't install Debian any more if it doesn't work out-of-the-box on most hardware - and the time is pretty much already here that most systems contain at least one component that loads firmware from disk every boot.
Tim -- Dr Tim Cutts GPG: 1024/D FC81E159 5BA6 8CD4 2C57 9824 6638 C066 16E2 F4F5 FC81 E159