Re: Plan for tomorrows (20080522) FESCO meeting

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva redhat com>]

On May 22, 2008, Dave Jones <davej redhat com> wrote:

>> >   # SND_KORG1212 - Korg 1212 IO
>> >   clean_ifdef sound/pci/korg1212/korg1212.c CONFIG_SND_KORG1212_FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL
>> >   clean_blob sound/pci/korg1212/korg1212-firmware.h
>> > 
>> >   # SND_MAESTRO3 - ESS Allegro/Maestro3
>> >   clean_ifdef sound/pci/maestro3.c CONFIG_SND_MAESTRO3_FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL
>> > 
>> >   # SND_YMFPCI - Yamaha YMF724/740/744/754
>> >   clean_blob sound/pci/ymfpci/ymfpci_image.h
>> >   clean_ifdef sound/pci/ymfpci/ymfpci_main.c CONFIG_SND_YMFPCI_FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL

> It's even easier than that. The drivers mentioned above _already_ have
> firmware loader support.

Which is exactly why I mentioned these 3.  tg3 would be another such
example, but that's about it.  They already are controlled by the
config options, but this doesn't solve anything, even if we were to
actually disable these config options.

> All that's needed is for someone to convert
> those arrays into an actual file the firmware loader can read, and
> package it up in an rpm, along with udev scripts to auto-load it,
> and we can disable that CONFIG option in the kernel.

But this still won't accomplish the goal of enabling someone to
distribute Fedora without distributing or committing to distribute
non-Free Software.  Anything less than actually removing the non-Free
Software from the kernel sources won't accomplish that.

Do you see *this* happening?

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva {lsd ic unicamp br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva {redhat com, gcc.gnu.org}