kernel-libre (hopefully 100% Free) for Fedora 8 and rawhide

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Tue Mar 25 05:50:38 UTC 2008


On Mar 23, 2008, "Jeff Spaleta" <jspaleta at gmail.com> 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}




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