[Fwd: Re: Fedora free software?]

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Mar 20, 2007, seth vidal <skvidal at linux.duke.edu> wrote:

> The whole point is we are educating users where we cannot do a more
> correct thing, right?

Educating users might very well be the best thing we can do, indeed.

I presented a suggestion to spot and Rahul in private, maybe I should
bring it up here, since we're on this topic.


What if Fedora were to split the non-Free firmware into a separate
repository and separate bootable media, such that the default
bootable/installable media would still be 100% Free Software, and it
would have a Firmware Buddy that would let users know about
freedom-depriving hardware in their computers.

When presented with such a message, the user would have the option of
proceeding (if possible) with the 100% Free Software install, even if
that would leave some hardware features unusable, or load the non-free
firmware media (think drivers disk) or reboot into an alternate media
(say a boot-non-free.iso) to perform even the install using such
non-Free components.

If we do this right, we may even be able to take these non-Free
components completely out of the Fedora project per se, and leave it
up to third parties to undertake the issue of integration of such
non-Free components.

-- 
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}