[Fsf-Debian] A small thought on how Debian might be able to help.

[Ansgar Burchardt]

Hi,

On 09/05/2014 19:05, John Sullivan wrote:
> For the FSF standards, the key is that there be no nonfree software.

Is the key no non-free software or no non-free software that the user sees?

As I understand previous discussions, the FSF is fine with non-free
firmware as long as it does not have to be loaded by the operating
system, i.e. already loaded on the card itself or loaded by the BIOS
before booting the (free) operating system.

I also have a question about this: in the extreme case the firmware for
devices can be more or less an operating system on its own, think IPMI
cards. Would this count as "free" as the operating system doesn't have
to load the firmware? If no, why do other devices with non-free on-board
firmware count as free?

> The
> ath9k-htc one is the only currently FSF-certified chipset, but we would
> consider others where there wasn't any firmware loaded by the kernel at
> all. The more user-modifiable the device is, the better, but our
> baseline standard only asks for no nonfree software.

I agree about this, but don't really make a difference where non-free
firmware comes from.

Ansgar