Re: kernel firmwares: GR proposal
On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 02:42:26PM -0400, Raul Miller wrote:
> What strikes me as ironic, with these proposals, is that we ran into
> something like this problem back in the 90s, back during the initial
> adoption of the DFSG, and we had to solve that problem then:
> we created the non-free and contrib sections.
>
> For some reason, these sections are no longer seen as adequate.
I agree with you, but the problem is also that d-i infrastructure needs to be
put in place, not only CD and archive stuff.
> As I understand it, one aspect of the problem is that CD/DVD
> distributors do not distribute these sections -- mostly because we
> have not made it easy for them to do so legally.
>
> Perhaps we should start addressing the CD distributor problem (perhaps
> tagging CD distributable software, and providing a simple mechanism to
> pull only CD distributable software for
> contrib/non-free).
>
> As for "hex as source". I've written machine code in hex, so I have no
> problem believing that other people would do such a thing. That said,
> for such source to be useful, the target (whether some general
> purpose machine language, microcode, some specific set of
> registers driving hardware, or whatever) needs to be documented
> well enough that someone else has a chance to read and comprehend
> the code. Also, except for really small bits of code (a couple
> K or less), a list of (or system of finding) entry points, internal
> branch points, and the like is also important
>
> The current proposals I've seen here don't seem to address these
> "readability" issues.
>
> That said, are plenty of grey areas here, and I understand that many
> programmers have little tolerance for ambiguity. Myself included,
> sometimes. So... if we want to get these issues sorted out in a
> timely fashion, perhaps the place to start would be enumerating the
> packages and issues, in some fashion that makes it easy for other
> informed people to append useful comments. (For example, if there
> were BTS pages for each package in question, a top level page listing
> the urls of each of those BTS pages might be nice.) Has someone
> already made such a page?
The package is the linux kernel package, and the affected files where audited
by Larry and he wrote a nice page, which i pasted to the debian kernel firmware
page on our wiki, altough in a not-nicyfied way. Jonas was going to nicify it
though.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
Reply to: