On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 02:08:43PM +0200, Marco d'Itri scribbled: > On Jun 01, Marek Habersack <grendel@debian.org> wrote: > > > are good uncles. The other hardware I mentioned above doesn't really have > > good support in the free software world and why is that? Because most of it > Actually some do: Alcatel USB DSL modems are supported by a good kernel > space driver, derived from code originally released by the company. Right, but they still require "non-free" firmware to be loaded by the userland driver. > And Centrino wireless cards /now/ are supported by a kernel driver > maintained by Intel people. > Both devices need that firmware is uploaded by the host OS, but having > the source for it would not help much maintaining free drivers, having > the documentation for its API is much more important. I fully agree with you. And yet, such firmware was removed from the debian kernel along with the driver. That's what was really wrong. > In the rest of your message you are confusing non-free drivers with > free drivers for devices which need a firmware to be provided by the > host. I wouldn't say I was confusing them, but yes, my point was to indicate that there is hardware that requires non-free software (be it a driver or firmware) in order to be usable. And Debian failed miserably by crippling its kernel when the tg driver was removed along with the firmware (even though the driver was free) regards, marek
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