Re: non-free firmware: driver in main or contrib?
On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 11:46:03PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Oh, come off it. The social contract says:
>
> "We provide the guidelines that we use to determine if a work is "free"
> in the document entitled "The Debian Free Software Guidelines". We
> promise that the Debian system and all its components will be free
> according to these guidelines. We will support people who create or use
> both free and non-free works on Debian. We will never make the system
> require the use of a non-free component."
>
> I see nothing that suggests that "non-free component" is only meant to
> apply to material shipped by Debian. Nor is there any suggestion that
> it applies only to software (which is unsurprising, given the care
> taken to remove all reference to software).
Do you really not see the references to Software in that quoted text?
If that's the case, you might have a reading comprehension problem.
> How do you claim that the social contract allows us to ship any drivers
> that require non-free firmware, even if they're on the PCB?
In cases where firmware is basically indistinguishable from hardware,
we treat it as hardware, and not as software.
--
Raul
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