Matthew Garrett wrote: > On the other hand, I don't believe it belongs in main. We've made a > commitment to providing only Free software in main, and having a maze of > twisty special-case exemptions wouldn't improve anybody's life. The > right thing to do is probably to find some way of clearly providing > software that says "This is not Free software, but we do not believe > that its non-Freeness impacts upon you in any desperately significant > way". But given that we're happy to provide GFDLed material in Sarge, > and that has a somewhat greater impact on useful freedom than this > firmware does, I think it's something we should leave until Sarge+1. > We're already compromising our principles, so we should get the damn > release out so we can think about how we can avoid doing so in future. I agree with both points. From the perspective of wanting to get a release out, with a working installer, this is a collossal pain. Some of the drivers that are already being removed[1], such as tg3, are amoung the ones most commonly used. At a minimum this will mean much wasted time on the part of the debian-installer team explaining to users that support for these devices is no longer part of Debian. (I hope you don't mind if we forward all such correspondance to this mailing list..) At the worst, it will delay the release of sarge by weeks or months as we design and put together an new infastructure to support non-free drivers in the installer. It will be very disappointing and de-motivating to us if, after all our hard work, the resulting installer is unusable because it supports less hardware then does woody's. -- see shy jo [1] so far only from 2.6 so it has not impacted d-i yet
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