On Sat, 29 Aug 2015, Philipp Kern wrote: > Having been a bit late I didn't fit into the room. I'm still in favor > to have a vote on this. I'm personally unconvinced by the argument > that it's "ok" for the hardware to use firmware blobs as long as you > don't load them from within Debian. (Or, as the FSF puts it, as long > as it's stored in a ROM.) The vote might still fail to achieve > supermajority requirements, but at least we would have a clear > statement that the Debian project is still committed to one way or > another. Some of the vote results had been pragmatic.
We voted on this in 2006 in the etch firmware vote (vote_003), and in the follow-on vote to clarify DFSG #2. The Etch firmware vote had an option to make the firmware exception permanent, which did not prevail. Conversely, the DFSG #2 vote would have made clear that DFSG #2 required all programmatic works to have source code, and also strongly recommend that manufacturers and distributors provide all source code, but that also didn't succeed. So while some time has passed since then, I'm not sure that voting will actually produce a very clear statement either way. -- Don Armstrong http://www.donarmstrong.com
