> Now, those who dismiss firmware freedom issues as irrelevant might > want to have a look at the material FSFLA prepared for FLISoL, a Free > Software install fest all over Latin American, that took place > yesterday, that in part addresses this very issue. It addresses it how? With rhetoric? Rhetoric is good, but it doesn't solve the primary problem: Users need working drivers for their hardware. 3d can be seen as a luxury, an acceptable sacrifice, but wireless? It cannot. I agree that we need to aggressively work with vendors to either remove the need for firmware blobs (Alan Cox can document (has documented?) how this is possible) or open the "source" for those firmware files. However, Fedora is not in a position where we can simply tell our users that we will not ship these files on political or moral grounds. They will simply go to Ubuntu. Or SuSE. Or any number of other distributions. We do the best that we can to compromise. We don't ship any "code" that is proprietary. We only permit firmware that is freely redistributable without restrictions. This compromise gives our users working wireless out of the box. Since the users cannot choose to download the firmware over their non-functional network, the only other step that I think we could take would be to prompt the user during install that in order to make their wireless work, Fedora needs to install firmware that is not-free. Perhaps thats not a bad idea for F8. I want to see the FSF advising Fedora what it can do to influence the hardware vendors to not use firmware blobs without killing off our user base. But that is a much harder problem to solve, and involves less rhetoric. ~spot _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
