LWN headline: Blame Fedora = High Praise

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

> 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