-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Sun, 06 Aug 2006 23:52:01 +0200 Goswin von Brederlow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> They have always been a problem and have always violated the license > of the rest of the kernel. It is just that nobody noticed or cared > before but now the cat is out of the sack and the issue is a release > blocker. > > Sometimes ignorance is bliss. But now we have seen the (ugly) light. I think there are two separate issues; one is whether debian can distribute the blobls and the other of whether distribution violates the social contract. For the first part, since most of blobs are probably extracted from non-free windows drivers, there probably is no vendor-stated permission to distributed the blobs, which could become the source of lawsuits if some company felt it was worth the bad PR (think SCO only with a legal foot to stand on). If permission is given to distribute the blobs unmodified (i.e. read from disk, upload to device), then the question is about the social contract. Personally I think firmware blobs shouln't be covered, because the reasons free software is important don't apply. As long as you have the hardware for which the blob was written (and the other hardware the device is compatible with), the firmware will work. It's a black box, that happens to be loaded on initialization instead in an ROM (AIUI). - -- GnuPG Key Fingerprint 86 F5 81 A5 D4 2E 1F 1C http://gnupg.org And that's my crabbing done for the day. Got it out of the way early, now I have the rest of the afternoon to sniff fragrant tea-roses or strangle cute bunnies or something. -- Michael Devore -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFE2TIMhvWBpdQuHxwRAg59AJ4r1EHRDM3s9p5z8tEEX0Q1qbVF7gCcDOeh 3vnXstPVVLpHKlqcFm6nM2o= =/HQD -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
