On Dec 09, Bruce Perens <bruce@perens.com> wrote: > The whole system has to be DFSG-free. Debian won't compromise on that. Which DFSG? The original one or the "clarified" one? > I have been thinking about the blob problem for a while. I propose to > remove blobs from the driver, and store them as files in initramfs (the > kernel-internal filesystem created by the stuff in /usr/src/linux*/usr) > or initrd.img. At boot time, the drivers would look for the blobs and You may want to take a look at debian-legal, because some people there think that even free drivers for hardware devices which need an externally loaded firmware are not acceptable for main. > load them if they are present, and fail gracefully or fall back if they > are not. This gets around some GPL issues, because rather than be There are no GPL issues for other distributions, nor for almost every kernel developers and I understand neither for the FSF. So you'd first have to persuade everybody else that the kernel is violating the GPL. > An alternative is to make blobs their own loadable modules, but then we > are treating them as code rather than as just a file that the kernel > sends to some device, and we get GPL issues. Encapsulating some data in an ELF object does not magically make it code. -- ciao, | Marco | [9686 esDusDIxsUiYM]
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