Re: Dealing with drivers that need firmware on the filesystem
Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org> 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.
>
> Note that this is strictly equivalent to the old netscape argument:
> does the absence of any useful free web browser, mean that netscape
> should not be 'penalised'? (Our answer was 'no')
No, the situations aren't equivilent. Removing Netscape didn't encourage
people to use non-free browsers. Removing drivers that use loadable
firmware encourages people to use hardware with built-in firmware.
> You also need to turn this question around and ask it the other way:
> does having these drivers in contrib actually hurt anything?
Yes. It currently means that we can't ship an installer with support for
this hardware, because we don't use material from contrib and non-free
by default.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.project@srcf.ucam.org
Reply to: