Marco d'Itri wrote:
After the resolution of #239952 I started looking for other binary firmwares distributed by debian. If we follow the same policy the X and kernel maintainers will have to remove the 3D drivers for the Matrox and ATI Rage 128 and Radeon video cards. The popular acenic ethernet driver will have to go as well. See #242865 and #242866 for details. I hope everybody will enjoy their firmware-clean kernels.
Ok,1. The kernel is GPL, firmware is part of kernel and thus GPL compatible. How is GPL not free?
2. There is no free software tools that will compile given firmware source code into a binary blob. Thus, the binary blob is *the only* way to distribute the driver in the kernel - pure source code will not compile.
3. By your reasoning, I want to have my kernel in Fortran. If you can only supply me with the useless blob called C, then it is non-free by DFSG because I do not consider it source code. I *demand* that the kernel be removed from Debian. Hasn't anyone considered that maybe the binary blob *is* the source code? Anyone asked the author(s)?
It is not non-free just because you can't read it. And frankly, there is *no* comparison with Qt/KDE - that was *license* issues.
- Adam -- Building your applications one byte at a time http://www.galacticasoftware.com