On Sun, Oct 24, 2004 at 10:45:18PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: > Ok, I guess somewhere I lost track of exactly what was being argued in this > thread. I agree, if the user (or some group of users to whom the driver is > useful) already have the required firmware, either in the device's flash or > on a driver CD, it shouldn't be necessary for us to consider this a > dependency of the driver, and thus the driver is eligible for main. I was > thinking of the possible case where *we* had to distribute a firmware blob.
Huh? If a driver requires a firmware blob be copied from a driver CD, it's a pretty clear non-free dependency--if the documentation says something like "copy this software (that we're not allowed to distribute) from your CD to /usr/lib/foo before running, or this driver won't work at all", it's contrib. I don't understand how there's any disagreement in this case: it's clearly software, covered by the DFSG (or at least the one Debian will be using soon), it's required (a Depends), and clearly non-free. -- Glenn Maynard
