The trouble with firmware

So does Debian. And both Debian and Fedora have solid legal reasons to require this. For example, CDs of source need to be sellable, which is difficult to do if the source contains non-free stuff. Debian is forced to modify roughly 1 out of every 50 source packages due to such issues.

Moreover I have developed the "3.0 (git)" source package format for Debian which uses git bundles. Of course non-free bits in git history makes using that more problematic, and the best workaround available at present is to bundle only a shallow clone of the repository that omits the non-free historical bits.

So any technical progress in this area could really be valuable, no matter what your opinion of the firmware file obfuscation part.