On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 05:28:23PM +1100, Craig Sanders wrote: > On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 02:36:03AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote: > > In the firmware case, the choice is rather different. At present, the > > choice is not between free firmware or non-free firmware. The choice is > > between non-free firmware on disk or non-free firmware in ROM. Putting > > drivers in contrib penalises the former, and as a result implicitly > > encourages the latter. > it's worse than just putting them in contrib. there's a whole bunch of > drivers with firmware blobs that have just been deleted from the kernel > sources. they're not in contrib, they're not in non-free, they're just gone. > this affects even DFSG-free drivers with DFSG-free patches. you often can't > apply the patches to the debianised kernel sources because the context that > the patch needs is missing. > e.g. try downloading the patch[1] for DVICO Fusion DVB-T card's DFSG-free > driver and applying it to the kernel source from any kernel-source-x.x.x > package. it won't apply to the debian kernel, yet it applies without a > problem to pristine sources downloaded from kernel.org. > [1] http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~chrisp/Linux-DVB/DVICO/ Tried, didn't find any patches on this page. Please provide a more exact URL, so that your claim that the patch fails to apply due to changes motivated by freeness "zealotry" -- and not by concerns about legality of distribution, or by technical considerations -- can be substantiated. Barring that, I'm not convinced this isn't FUD on your part; though in any case, a single third-party patch failing to apply to a Debian kernel tree is scant argument in favor of abandoning a principled stance. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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