On Mar 23, 2008, "Jeff Spaleta" <jspaleta@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > That being said, I'd like to see this effort integrated into our existing > kernel package if its possible. It really isn't. It's not just that I'm not much of a kernel hacker, it's that upstream isn't all that interested in getting rid of stuff that requires non-Free firmware. For someone who wants to make sure everything they get and redistribute from Fedora is Free Software (as one might expect from the stated goal), the non-Free firmware disguised as sources in the kernel are offensive, and the modules that demand non-Free firmware are just a waste of resources. Now, if one would try to convince upstream media players developed in software patent-free countries to remove say mp3 just because Fedora has decided not to ship mp3, you can understand what kind of battle I'd be up to if I were to try to convince maintainers of individual portions of the kernel to get rid of the stuff they care about. Add to that my inability to test the patches I'd submit to that end, because I don't have the hardware needed to exercise the problems, and even if I had, I'd rather keep the non-Free firmware it requires at a distance. So, what can I do? Remove the offensive stuff and be done with it. Sure it's a lot of work, but at least it gets me a 100% Free kernel now, rather than never. And then, as the kernel removes the non-Free bits, we can strip off less and less code. Maybe some day we could get it down to zero. But I'm not holding my breath, considering that not only patches recently added upstream, but also patches added by Fedora itself, introduce more non-Free firmware. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ FSF Latin America Board Member http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
