LWN headline: Blame Fedora = High Praise

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Alexandre Oliva schrieb:
> On Apr 30, 2007, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> 
>> Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>>> Once more time, I'm not talking about the firmware in the kernel.
>>>
>>> That's harder to remove, I agree.  One has to get out of one's way to
>>> do that.
> 
>> Just pointing out that you are drawing a line between firmware inside
>> the kernel and firmware outside of it while Fedora is drawing a line
>> between firmware and other forms of proprietary software.
> 
> i) I'm not.  The FSF did, and did it a while ago, before even thinking
> about removing stuff from the kernel was thinkable.
> [...]

Hmmm. I'd really like to see an entirely free spin of Fedora that
doesn't include firmware as separate packages or in the kernel. As the
latter is not possible easily yet it doesn't make much sense starting to
work on it yet.

But my logic fails to follow this:

Seperate firmware			-> 	unacceptable
Firmware that's part of the kernel	-> 	acceptable

That looks like a foul compromise to me. If firmware is considered
non-Free then *for my logic* it should be considered non-Free wherever
it located/part of.

In other words: As long as Fedora has firmware files as part of the
kernel it's IMHO not much worse if we have some firmware bits in
userland, too. And heck, that's probably better for everyone --
otherwise people or vendors might start putting even more firmware files
into the kernel somehow.

CU
Thorsten 'knurd' Leemhuis