Re: DFSG violations: non-free but no contrib
On Tue, Nov 04, 2008, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> It is better and more honest to our users to tell them, "that's not
> ours and we cannot fix it. We cannot pledge to support it. Here it is,
> it is a nice blob, but it is NOT ours, go bug your hardware
> manufacturer for support".
Ack.
> It is not that I want Debian to ship a system with no hardware support
> - But that I'd prefer it to be kept visibly separate.
I fully agree.
> And not because they are inherently evil or anything, but because
> Debian is not the right place to distribute them from. See what I
> wrote regarding the RFCs - I agree with the IETF, the RFCs server much
> better their purpose being non-free than if they were DFSG-free. But
> that's not a reason to bend Debian's principles and ship IETF RFCs in
> main.
I see your point. Albeit all the things we're talking about are quite
different in nature.
A wifi card needs to be usable to access the network even during an
install, so if we want to support hardware which requires firmware to
be loaded after each boot with the Debian OS, the file needs to be
accessible to the Debian OS.
I see how easy it is to define that "everything which Debian
distributes is free software". I wish I'd have a rule as simple to
claim which would make it clear that "this is a free OS which comes
with some companion firmware files without source to make hardware just
work".
Anyway, there's too little traction to suggest changing our foundation
documents in an unclear way, so I'll shut up.
--
Loïc Minier
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