Re: DFSG violations in Lenny: Summarizing the choices

[Alexandre Oliva <lxoliva@fsfla.org>]

On Sat, Nov 8, 2008, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:

> Why not just support it in non-free exactly the way we do other things?

Indeed.  Arguably, documentation is even more important than making
non-Free firmware trivially-accessible to users, and users might be
tempted to add non-free to their repo selections to get to the
documentation.

So, if splitting out non-free-firmware is an argument to help avoid
users accidentally getting software that's in non-free installed on
their computers, then splitting out the documentation would be even
more of a priority to accomplish this goal.

I consider documentation far more important because it's pertaining to
the Free Software that Debian ships, whereas the firmware is for
hardware that Debian doesn't ship, and that (i) is mostly irrelevant,
or (ii) doesn't really require the firmware, or (iii) is relatively
easy to replace.  Say, even a WiFi card soldered to the motherboard
can be "replaced" by a USB WiFi interface.

So, if you consider seriously the introduction of a non-free-firmware
repo, please take the opportunity to introduce a non-DFSG docs repo as
well.

Best,

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}