On Sun, 2008-09-07 at 05:15 -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
The reason the FSF isn't advocating Fedora at this point is
pretty
much only because Fedora doesn't yet strip the binary firmware
provided by the Linux kernel (and still provides some re-distributable
binary firmware in other packages, the microcode package and
alsa-firmware I think). I suppose there is also still some inertia
from back at a time when Fedora wasn't as good it is now with
licensing checking on packages.
We are almost at the point where we can do a spin which remedies that.
Our 'kernel-firmware' package is currently built from the kernel source
as a subpackage of the normal kernel build -- but we should stop doing
that anyway, and build it instead as a completely separate package from
the linux-firmware.git repository on
kernel.org. That repository
contains more firmware than the kernel does already, and is going to be
gaining even more.
Once we're doing that as a completely separate package, people will be
able to do an alternative package which Provides: kernel-firmware, but
which contains only the stuff for which they have source.
Then they can do their own Fedora spin which _does_ meet the FSF
requirements, although we obviously don't want the 'real' Fedora spin to
do that.
--
David Woodhouse Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse(a)intel.com Intel Corporation