Josh Triplett wrote:
I would like to suggest an additional option, which I think covers most cases quite well: If Debian were to package (a copy of) the non-free item in the non-free section, would the Free package express a Depends, Recommends, or Build-Depends on the non-free package? If so, the Free package should be in contrib.
That's an interesting criteria. It winds up working for flash and ROM-based devices because they are like Essential: yes packages.
However, it has one pitfall I can think of: If a package requires a certain version of an essential package, we'd normally declare a Depends: on that version (or later). I'm not sure what we'd do for firmware, though it'd probably be either a 'Suggests' or 'Recommends'.