Brian Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > It's a completely inconsistent and arbitrary policy.
It's hardly that. We distribute only free software, that's our rule. The rest, as you say, is for the manufacturer and the user to work out, but we disvalue non-free software, and so we don't distribute it in main. (And packages which require it go into contrib.) You only see it as inconsistent because you think the relevant consideration is "do we support this hardware", and you don't care how we support it. Most of us *do* care; we support it provided we can do so without distributing non-free software, because Debian is 100% Free Software. Things we cannot support with free software we do not support. This is not an inconsistent policy; this is the core of what Debian stands for. To say it is arbitrary is worse, because that insults the motives of the people who disagree with you. Thomas
