kernel-libre (hopefully 100% Free) for Fedora 8 and rawhide

[Rahul Sundaram]

Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> On Mar 23, 2008, "Jeff Spaleta" <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> That being said, I'd like to see this effort integrated into our existing
>> kernel package if its possible.
> 
> It really isn't.  It's not just that I'm not much of a kernel hacker,
> it's that upstream isn't all that interested in getting rid of stuff
> that requires non-Free firmware.

I wouldn't really say that. A number of kernel developers have expressed 
interest in getting it done and they can probably outline a good path to 
do so. It is different from the method you are trying here and IMO it is 
in your interest to listen.

> Now, if one would try to convince upstream media players developed in
> software patent-free countries to remove say mp3 just because Fedora
> has decided not to ship mp3, you can understand what kind of battle
> I'd be up to if I were to try to convince maintainers of individual
> portions of the kernel to get rid of the stuff they care about.

This has happened before though. Upstream projects are willing to 
separate out as plugins functionality that downstream distributions 
can't or don't want to include so that we can pick and choose what we 
want. Ex: gstreamer.

Similarly, you can choose to incrementally move things out of the kernel 
which judging from this thread is a approach that Fedora can work with 
without having to introduce a new kernel. A new kernel might not be 
major work for you but it is a overhead for things like QA. Just look at 
the mess with a separate xen kernel to understand this.

Rahul