On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 10:51:39AM +0100, Frank Küster wrote: > When the issue of binary blobs in the kernel was first discussed here, > if I'm not mistaken the proposed solution was to rewrite the respective > drivers to be able to load the blob at runtime from "somewhere", and > that somewhere would then be populated from non-free or an external > source. And it was said that if the hardware device generally works > without firmware loading, just with worse performance, or if most > devices supported by the driver worked without, and just a minority > depended upon it, then the driver (the kernel module or monolitic > kernel) would be Free.
Just to be a little clearer: drivers that require non-free firmware, but are under a Free license, are Free. Software which is not Free always goes in non-free. Software that is Free goes in either main or contrib. The active question, here, is not whether these drivers are Free; we're assuming they're Free, and asking whether they should go in main or contrib due to the firmware being non-free. -- Glenn Maynard
