Re: non-free firmware: driver in main or contrib?

[Lewis Jardine <lewis@catbox.co.uk>]

Marco d'Itri wrote:
> evan@debian.org wrote:
> > Of course, there's shades of gray, here. If all the driver does is emit
> > a message CAN'T FIND NON-FREE FIRMWARE, ABORTING without the firmware,
> > it's hard to say that it doesn't depend on the firmware. But if the
>
> This applies to almost every driver in the Linux kernel. 

/usr/src/linux$ grep --directories=recurse -i -c firmware drivers/* | 
grep -v :0$ | wc -l
    452
/usr/src/linux$ grep --directories=recurse -i -c firmware drivers/* | 
grep :0$ | wc -l
   3242

Less than 14% of the driver source files in 2.4.26 even mention the word 
'firmware'. Hardly 'almost every driver'.

> Are you ready to move most of the kernel to non-free too?

I couldn't swear to it, but aren't the few drivers that do need 
firmwares being removed from the Debian kernel?

2.4.19 README.Debian:
>Non-free bits removed:
>
>* Keyspan firmware.
>* SMC Token Ring firmware, driver disabled.
>* ACENIC firwmare, driver disabled.
>* DGRS firmware, driver disabled.
>* DAB firmware, driver disabled.

--
Lewis Jardine
IANAL IANADD