[Mageia-dev] Non-free firmwares in installer

[Romain d'Alverny]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 17:45, Michael Scherer <misc at zarb.org> wrote:
> But my issue is not about non-free firmwares and those who use them or
> not, but about the gradual move to non-free packages on the free dvd iso
> ( http://netsplit.com/2006/11/27/slippery-slopes/ ).
>
> When I started at Mandrake Linux, there was no non-free repository. Then
> one day, non-free was created, and then soon, it was activated by
> default for the free version. Then I opened this bug,
> https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=40033 , who took 2 years to be
> fixed. And what I just see is yet another push to bury a little bit more
> values I care.

Please be more explicit about the values here then. So far I don't see
no push. We're discussing this. Speaking of values, is this going
against the project values and announcement so far? (even in a
slippery way)

Obviously, the very imperfect nature of free/non-free semantics does
not help at all here.

Summary (from http://mageia.org/wiki/doku.php?id=licensing_policy):
 * core: stuff that is not Free/Open Source according to OSI/FSF does
not belong here. Not even closed-source stuff that we can
redistribute. So if there is at this time, that's something to fix.
 * nonfree: what does not qualify for core that we can still
redistribute; includes closed-source, proprietary, binaries and blobs.
 * tainted: what could be in core or nonfree but bears more risks
(software patents, most likely for now).

Now, for what we distribute in printed medias (DVD/CD for now), the
initial point was to provide some necessary bits from nonfree along
with core so that a local install can work with some specific hardware
(network, video).

That does not prevent from shipping CD/DVD that only bear core on it I
believe? (what we used to do with Free at MDV).

And that does not prevent from shipping too CD/DVD that bears more
than that (stuff located in nonfree), to ease setup for some users (or
even make a LiveCD usable).

Is there a problem here? which one?



Romain