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



On Sun, Oct 24, 2004 at 10:45:18PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Ok, I guess somewhere I lost track of exactly what was being argued in this
> thread.  I agree, if the user (or some group of users to whom the driver is
> useful) already have the required firmware, either in the device's flash or
> on a driver CD, it shouldn't be necessary for us to consider this a
> dependency of the driver, and thus the driver is eligible for main.  I was
> thinking of the possible case where *we* had to distribute a firmware blob.

Huh?  If a driver requires a firmware blob be copied from a driver CD,
it's a pretty clear non-free dependency--if the documentation says
something like "copy this software (that we're not allowed to distribute)
from your CD to /usr/lib/foo before running, or this driver won't work
at all", it's contrib.

I don't understand how there's any disagreement in this case: it's clearly
software, covered by the DFSG (or at least the one Debian will be using
soon), it's required (a Depends), and clearly non-free.

-- 
Glenn Maynard



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