Dear Debian developers,
As an amendement to the firmware GR, I hereby propose the following
position statement.
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THE DEBIAN PROJECT:
1. reaffirms its dedication to providing a 100% free system to
our users according to our Social Contract and the DFSG; and
2. encourages licensors of all works to make those works
available not only under licenses that permit modification, but also in
forms that make such modifications practical;
3. commits itself to remove firmwares without source code and
more generally firmwares that does not meet the Debian Free Software
Guidelines (designed below as "non-free firmwares") from the main and
contrib section of our archive;
4. will make a best effort to remove as much non-free firmwares
as time allows before our next stable release (code-named "Etch");
5. encourages its developers to work on this issue;
6. urges its developers not to delay or to block inclusion of
works done toward that goal;
7. will allow our next release to include non-free firmwares
in the main section if we did not manage to remove them on time, provided
they were also present in Sarge main section.
===============================================
What I want to avoid is the result GR _preventing_ people to work
on removing non-free firmwares for Etch because their work will be
rejected with "this is a post-Etch issue". I hope 4,5, and 6 achieve
that. 7 is a compromise I find acceptable and force us to make
_some_ progress on the issue before releasing Etch (which will keep us
honest with respect to 3.).
Cheers,
Bill (who compiled the list of firmware in linux 2.4.25)
Thanks go to Larry Doolittle for providing the list for 2.6.17.
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