Fedora not "free" enough for GNU?

[David Woodhouse]

On Sun, 2008-09-07 at 05:15 -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> The reason the FSF isn't advocating Fedora at this point is pretty
> much only because Fedora doesn't yet strip the binary firmware
> provided by the Linux kernel (and still provides some re-distributable
> binary firmware in other packages, the microcode package and
> alsa-firmware I think).  I suppose there is also still some inertia
> from back at a time when Fedora wasn't as good it is now with
> licensing checking on packages.

We are almost at the point where we can do a spin which remedies that.

Our 'kernel-firmware' package is currently built from the kernel source
as a subpackage of the normal kernel build -- but we should stop doing
that anyway, and build it instead as a completely separate package from
the linux-firmware.git repository on kernel.org. That repository
contains more firmware than the kernel does already, and is going to be
gaining even more.

Once we're doing that as a completely separate package, people will be
able to do an alternative package which Provides: kernel-firmware, but
which contains only the stuff for which they have source. 

Then they can do their own Fedora spin which _does_ meet the FSF
requirements, although we obviously don't want the 'real' Fedora spin to
do that.

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse at intel.com                              Intel Corporation