Matthew Garrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Let's pretend that Debian actually has a significant amount of leverage > on this sort of issue, and that vendors see their drivers appearing in > contrib and want to do something about it. They /could/ open the > firmware and provide a toolchain for it. We'd put the driver in main, > then. Alternatively, they could put the firmware in ROM. In this case, > the amount of non-free code on a user's system would not change, but > we'd move the driver to main anyway.
So they might do the right thing! And they choose a mechanism for inhibiting users other than licensing restrictions. Either way, it ceases to be Debian's game. We are for free software, and there are a lot of ways to hurt people that Debian is not concerned with. > Note that this doesn't mean I think firmware should be in main. But I > think that's an entirely separate argument. Picking on drivers that > force us to notice their dependencies on non-free code while ignoring > drivers that are just as dependent (but in a less obvious way) is > hypocrisy. No, because we have chosen a limited set of goals. We are for free software, not Curing All The World's Ills. There is nothing hypocritical about Debian deciding to attack one problem (non-free software) without attacking a different problem (unchangeable burned-in software).
