Thiemo Seufer wrote:
[I'm not subscribed to -legal] Glenn Maynard wrote:On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 02:22:58AM +0200, Thiemo Seufer wrote:Currently those concerns are vented by people who aren't authors of kernel stuff.Indeed: it's by people who are concerned about violating the licensing terms of those who are.Exactly. An unrelated third party, whose stance doesn't matter for the issue.
As I understand it, Debian makes a point of considering the interests of 'unrelated third part[ies]', especially when it comes to the chance of copyright infringement. If a fully working, tested solution to load non-free firmware from userland into the kernel (thus avoiding the linking problem) fell from the sky tomorrow, I suspect very few people would suggest that it was A Bad Thing, and that the kernel was better when it had potentially dubious, non-free blobs in it.
In my opinion, the problem isn't the principle, merely the practicality: a delayed Sarge would be annoying, but the products that are necessary for an 'anally-free' Sarge would be of great benefit to users of both Debian, and Free Software in general.
Clause four of (even the unamended) social contract, in my opinion, suggests that later is better than less free, and thus the amendment was The Right Thing, even though it may delay Sarge.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2004/debian-vote-200403/msg00964.html (emphasis mine)
"4. *Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software* *We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free-software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities.* We will support the needs of our users for operation in many different kinds of computing environment. We won't object to commercial software that is intended to run on Debian systems, and we'll allow others to create value-added distributions containing both Debian and commercial software, without any fee from us. To support these goals, we will provide an integrated system of high-quality, *100% free software, with no legal restrictions that would prevent these kinds of use*. " -- Lewis Jardine IANAL IANADD