[Fsf-Debian] A small thought on how Debian might be able to help.

[Steven Chamberlain]

On 05/09/14 18:05, John Sullivan wrote:
> The above is also a good example, because the firmware started its life
> proprietary.

Possibly another example:  does anyone know the history of Adaptec
aic7xxx SCSI HBA firmware?  I suspect it also started out proprietary.

But now both Linux and FreeBSD have mechanisms to build the firmware
from source.  That allows it to comply with the DFSG.

On 09/09/14 19:48, Paul Wise wrote:
> A related thing would be for Debian to build our existing free
> firmware from source instead of shipping existing binaries like we do
> now.

Really?  Do any packages in main ship binary firmware like that?  That
violates the DFSG surely?


Either way I think, in order to have free firmware, the free-libre
distributions need to provide a good toolchain and environment for
firmware development.  Distributing open-source firmware to be built
from source, would then be a more natural thing to do. (vs. firmware
that was developed in proprietary software - which even if it were
open-sourced, we may be unable to build anyway)

Regards,
-- 
Steven Chamberlain
steven at pyro.eu.org