Nobody wanted to do the work

Nobody wanted to do the work

Posted Jan 7, 2009 1:27 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510)
Parent article: Debian votes to move forward with Lenny release

Going ahead to make a working distribution without proprietary firmware BLOBs requires that someone carefully modify all necessary drivers to put the BLOBs in files that can be loaded at boot time, rather than arrays in the kernel. And the drivers have to fail gracefully if they can't find the blobs. And then the blobs have to be packaged in non-free, and the user has to be given a one-click option to install them. Debian will not be able to resolve this issue gracefully until they do this work completely. They and others have done it partially, and this seems to be the policy of the kernel developers anyway, of late, but its implementation is less than complete. IMO BLOBs that operate entirely below the level of the I/O bus once loaded can be treated as opaque and do not present a significant DFSG issue IMO. There is still the issue that most firmware sucks, having all of the problems of opaque software developed by small teams and rarely maintained afterward. Driver developers and users pay for its suckage, which is reason enough for us to lobby for more open-ness by firmware developers.

Binary-only programs that run in the kernel or user-space are a bigger issue. They're not portable across CPU architectures, for one thing, which has bitten real users and businesses. We can't allow ourselves to depend on them, for our own good. Debian shouldn't include them.

Bruce

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