Re: kernel-libre (hopefully 100% Free) for Fedora 8 and rawhide

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva redhat com>]

On Mar 25, 2008, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram fedoraproject org> wrote:

> Similarly, you can choose to incrementally move things out of the
> kernel which judging from this thread is a approach that Fedora can
> work with without having to introduce a new kernel.

But this doesn't get me a kernel I can distribute today.  Or a kernel
I can use today.  Or a kernel that could go in Fedora 9.

> Just look at the mess with a separate xen kernel to understand this.

I do understand it, and I realize it's a very different issue.
Removing code, as done in kernel-libre, is *much* easier than
forward-porting large patches.


And then, how would I post patches upstream that remove the offending
bits from upstream without re-distributing the very offending bits I
find it immoral to distribute in the first place?  That's why won't
even distribute a patch from original to modified sources: it contains
the non-Free bits in /^-/ lines.  That's a line I'm not willing to
cross.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva {redhat com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva {lsd ic unicamp br, gnu.org}