Re: LCC and blobs

[Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Brian Nelson <pyro@debian.org> wrote:

> You are the only person I've seen express views similar to mine on
> debian-legal.  All other participants argue for non-free-firmware-using
> drivers going in contrib.

(cough)

I'm still entirely unclear on the logic of moving drivers that require
firmware to be loaded from disk to contrib. If they didn't require that
non-free code to be on disk, it'd be in a ROM on the device instead. All
drivers require non-free firmware - whether we have to ship it or not
should not affect the freedom (or otherwise) of a driver.

Let's pretend that Debian actually has a significant amount of leverage
on this sort of issue, and that vendors see their drivers appearing in
contrib and want to do something about it. They /could/ open the
firmware and provide a toolchain for it. We'd put the driver in main,
then. Alternatively, they could put the firmware in ROM. In this case,
the amount of non-free code on a user's system would not change, but
we'd move the driver to main anyway.

Note that this doesn't mean I think firmware should be in main. But I
think that's an entirely separate argument. Picking on drivers that
force us to notice their dependencies on non-free code while ignoring
drivers that are just as dependent (but in a less obvious way) is
hypocrisy.
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.devel@srcf.ucam.org