Re: non-free firmware: driver in main or contrib?
josh.trip@verizon.net wrote:
>I find the criteria extremely clear and consistent: if it depends on
>stuff that is either non-free, or that is too non-free to even ship, it
>goes to contrib. If a user can install and run it (and be able to
But, as I already explained, the driver does not depend on the firmware
and is fully functional without it.
So you are the one who is arguing to force a dependency.
>non-free firmware also goes to main. Now, what differentiates the case
>of requiring non-free firmware from the case of requiring non-free NDIS
>drivers?
NDIS drivers are drivers running on your CPU, and writing free drivers
from scratch without support from the hardware vendor is plausbile (and
useful).
Firmwares do not run on the host CPU (they are /data/ for the host
system), and reverse engineering one is not plausible and probably not
useful either. And again, almost every device needs a firmware, either
already on board or uploaded by the host, so the quantity of non-free
software used does not change.
So, if a driver for a network card with on board firmware is in main,
why a driver for a network card with uploadable firmware should be in
contrib, if in both situations the same quantity of non-free software
is being used?
>separately. Why not let ndiswrapper go to main? And if you think
ndiswrapper should go in main because I'm sure that there are free
NDIS drivers around.
--
ciao,
Marco
Reply to: