Brian Thomas Sniffen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Matthew Garrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> Two issues: >> >> 1) The social contract doesn't give us any leeway here. There's no >> way to claim that hardware doesn't have to conform to the DFSG, and >> there's no way to claim that large parts of Debian don't require that >> hardware. > > Sure it does. The Debian Free Software Guidelines only apply to > software. Hardware is hard, not soft.
That's an unfortunate circumstance of naming. Anything that we could potentially ship has to be considered as software - the aspects of hardware that we're discussing are instructions that are run by a processor, and we could extract those and copy them into the distribution. Software doesn't stop being software once it's copied into ROM, even if you'd prefer it to be called hardware. >> 2) The contents of an eeprom can generally be touched from software. You >> need a firmer basis for your line. > > That... requires some thought. I don't mean to say that *all* drivers > for firmware-using devices must go in contrib. Merely that those > drivers which Depend, in the policy sense, on non-free software must > go in contrib, and that any loadable firmware is software. Whether > it's a Dependency depends on the individual case -- a device that > ignores its firmware isn't a dependency, a driver that can drive > prelaoded devices is a Suggestion, and so on. The social contract uses "require", which is a stronger term than policy's "depend". The driver software requires the portion of the hardware that can also be described as software. -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
