Re: A summary of the current firmware GRs

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 04:18:48PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Oct 2006 22:15:02 +0200, Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> said: 
> 
> > On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 09:36:09PM +0200, Adrian von Bidder wrote:
> >> Yodel!
> >> 
> >> With the first (?) CfV out now about non-free kernel firmwares:
> >> 
> >> I'm not going to vote, sorry.  I don't have the time to wade
> >> through tons of mailing list archives, of which 1/3 is repetitions
> >> of previously made statements, 1/3 is presumably flames or close to
> >> it, and 1/3 is trivial corrections, with the few substantial
> >> arguments scattered in it...
> >> 
> >> In short: did anybody do a reasonably balanced and concise writeup
> >> about what is going on on the firmware front regarding
> >> - what are the important arguments and counter-arguments?
> >> - who supports which options?
> 
> > More information can be found at the start of :
> 
> >   http://wiki.debian.org/KernelFirmwareLicensing
> 
>         I like the clarifications. However, this is missing an
>  important affirmation, that the Etch kernel shall not be a regression
>  of freedom from the Sarge kernels.

See my other reply to you in another thread.

>         We affirm that progress has been made, and so it should not
>  be a problem to say Etch kernels shall be at least as free as Sarge
>  kernels. If Etch kernels are not as free as Sarge kernels, then we
>  should remove the the clause abuot making progress, since that would
>  be untrue.

This brings the problem of measurement of "freeness", because there is overall
progress, but may be individual regression because of the new classification,
and because for sarge we didn't take any care of the users and left some of
them fully unsupported without alternatives, which is not what we want to do
here.

So, since the set of firmwares removed in sarge is not a strict subset of
those removed for etch, using the wording you used is problematic.

Maybe something indicating we have made progress (well, we, but also
upstream), but we already say that in 2. Maybe we can beef up a bit clause 2.
instead ? 

Friendly,

Sven Luther