Re: Proposal - Deferment of Changes from GR 2004-003

[Thomas Hood <jdthood@yahoo.co.uk>]

On Sat, 2004-05-01 at 15:13, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> > Then in this case, we would put the drivers into to contrib, and the
> > firmware into non-free.  
>
> No. Drivers do not need a firmware, hardware does.

I would also prefer to interpret policy this way.

Policy says:
    Examples of packages which would be included in _contrib_
    or _non-US/contrib_ are:
        * free packages which require _contrib_, _non-free_ packages
          or packages which are not in our archive at all for
          compilation or execution, and
        * wrapper packages or other sorts of free accessories for
          non-free programs.

In the following I am talking about drivers from which non-free
software has been removed, but which are still capable of loading
software from user space onto peripherals.  Also, I am only
talking about drivers of peripherals for which the only available
software is non-free -- otherwise the driver can obviously go into
main.

Such a driver doesn't require non-free peripheral software in order
to be compiled or in order to execute.  Neither can it be called a
"wrapper" of the software that gets loaded onto the peripheral.
For the driver, the peripheral software is just a data blob.  I 
think that we can compare it to a font editor in a world where no
free fonts have been published, or to a document viewer for some
document format in which format all existing documents happen to be
non-free.
--
Thomas Hood