Re: LCC and blobs
Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
This would make more sense if I sent it to the right list, really. Sorry
about that.
> Brian Nelson <pyro@debian.org> wrote:
>
>> You are the only person I've seen express views similar to mine on
>> debian-legal. All other participants argue for non-free-firmware-using
>> drivers going in contrib.
>
> (cough)
>
> I'm still entirely unclear on the logic of moving drivers that require
> firmware to be loaded from disk to contrib. If they didn't require that
> non-free code to be on disk, it'd be in a ROM on the device instead. All
> drivers require non-free firmware - whether we have to ship it or not
> should not affect the freedom (or otherwise) of a driver.
>
> Let's pretend that Debian actually has a significant amount of leverage
> on this sort of issue, and that vendors see their drivers appearing in
> contrib and want to do something about it. They /could/ open the
> firmware and provide a toolchain for it. We'd put the driver in main,
> then. Alternatively, they could put the firmware in ROM. In this case,
> the amount of non-free code on a user's system would not change, but
> we'd move the driver to main anyway.
>
> Note that this doesn't mean I think firmware should be in main. But I
> think that's an entirely separate argument. Picking on drivers that
> force us to notice their dependencies on non-free code while ignoring
> drivers that are just as dependent (but in a less obvious way) is
> hypocrisy.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.legal@srcf.ucam.org
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