It's becomingly increasingly common for hardware to require firmware to be loaded by the device driver on boot, rather than containing it in ROM. This is unfortunate, because in most cases the firmware is non-free. As a result, a naive application of policy suggests that drivers which require this firmware should appear in contrib.
This causes two problems. The first is practical - there's currently no way that we can provide these drivers on the install media. The second is philosophical - we effectively penalise drivers that require their non-free firmware to appear on the filesystem rather than in a piece of flash. The free/non-free distinction was made because we felt that people should use free software rather than non-free software when available. In cases where there was no free alternative, failing to provide the non-free version would encourage the development of a free one. Irritating for the user, but good for free software. Fair enough. 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. So, a couple of questions: a) Does having these drivers in contrib benefit either (i) our users, or (ii) free software? (Bear in mind again that removing these drivers from main doesn't encourage people to write free firmware, it encourages them to buy hardware that has firmware in flash. Ironically, it therefore becomes harder to produce free firmware...) b) If not, what's the correct approach? We /could/ put non-free firmware in main, on the grounds that while it is in many cases executable code, it does not execute on any processor that is under the direct control of the operating system. This would possibly require a small alteration to the social contract. A result of this would be that not everything in main would be DFSG free. An alternative would be to leave non-free firmware in non-free, but not to enforce the requirement that drivers depending on it end up in contrib. This is possibly the most straight forward, and by squinting funny we could possibly even argue that the social contract already allows this. A third possibility would be to create a new section for material that is non-free but whose freeness we don't really care about. Drivers in main would be allowed to depend on this, and we'd include it on the install media. This would require changing the social contract. The firmware situation now is similar to the free software situation in the early 80s. Back then, free software depended on the existence of proprietary code. It still does now, but the proprietary code has moved further down the stack. I think it's entirely justifiable to try to sever that dependence in the future, but we can't do it now. Trying would be equivalent to trying to ship an entirely free distribution in 1985 - we have some free components, but there's no free versions of their dependencies. Until we've actually made a start on removing that dependency, I think it's unreasonable to punish our users over it. -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
