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

[Paul Wise]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 2:55 AM, Steven Chamberlain wrote:

> Really?  Do any packages in main ship binary firmware like that?  That
> violates the DFSG surely?

Debian doesn't require things are actually built from source, just
that they can be. For examples look at the firmware-free source
package (or any package that uses autoconf but doesn't build-dep on
dh-autoreconf).

http://sources.debian.net/src/firmware-free/latest/

> Either way I think, in order to have free firmware, the free-libre
> distributions need to provide a good toolchain and environment for
> firmware development.  Distributing open-source firmware to be built
> from source, would then be a more natural thing to do. (vs. firmware
> that was developed in proprietary software - which even if it were
> open-sourced, we may be unable to build anyway)

Agreed, however the problem with that is they often use custom chips
so we might end up with one toolchain per supported device.

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise