Yes, compiling a package from source is not strictly needed as long as it can be done with a toolchain in Debian, its copyright status is clear and the ftpmasters and release team do not consider it too much complex to be manually built from source (e.g. if security updates are needed). But still, I am not sure that it would be useful for Debian to distribute this: in my experience nowadays firmware upgrades usually come with their own bootable image which can trivially be loaded with memdisk.
Yes, I got a similar response from Ryan Finnie, the "upstream" author of the Balder disk image:
<http://lists.colobox.com/pipermail/finnix/2010-January/000095.html> -- Dipl.-Phys. Fabian Greffrath Ruhr-Universität Bochum Lehrstuhl für Energieanlagen und Energieprozesstechnik (LEAT) Universitätsstr. 150, IB 3/134 D-44780 Bochum Telefon: +49 (0)234 / 32-26334 Fax: +49 (0)234 / 32-14227 E-Mail: greffrath@leat.ruhr-uni-bochum.de