Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 6th Jan 2009 13:48 UTC
"The developers behind the Debian Linux distribution are preparing for the upcoming release of Debian 5, which is codenamed Lenny. The decision to move forward with the release follows a contentious vote over whether to permit the inclusion of binary blobs in the new version of the distribution. Consensus coalesced around a controversial proposal to "assume blobs comply with the GPL unless proven otherwise."
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Member since:
2006-01-01
I couldn't agree more. Debian developers like to gain perspective on problems by discussing them, and these discussions are beneficial exactly because they have resulted in such a great progress.
Debian has already removed from their main package archive the sourceless firmware blobs that were in Etch. That's progress.
Debian has continued to study which firmware blobs are non-free and how those can be removed from the kernel.[1][2] That's progress.
Debian has packaged some sourceless firmware and made it available to users from the non-free package archive in order to support common hardware. That's progress.
Debian-installer for Lenny has now an option to load non-free firmware from external media, if that is needed to support hardware. That's progress.
It's unfortunate that Debian couldn't solve all of these issues before Debian 5.0 had entered the pre-release freeze but I think they're still making very good progress.
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/KernelFirmwareLicensing
[2] http://womble.decadent.org.uk/blog/for-those-who-care-about-firmwar...