Glenn Maynard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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.
Thanks, I really wasn't clear about that. But the question is still the same: If the procedure described above was regarded as sufficient to keep distributing the kernel in main, why must a userland tool that does essentially the same (AFAICT) go to contrib? Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich Debian Developer
