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Debian 6.0 To Feature a Completely Free Kernel
dkd903 writes "The Debian Project has announced that the upcoming release — Debian 6.0 'Squeeze' — will have a completely free Linux kernel. This means that the Linux kernel which ships with Debian 6.0 will not have any non-free firmware. The Debian Project has been working on removing the non-free parts since the last two releases. With Squeeze, they are finally realizing that goal."
More threads on the Internet of people going, 'I can't find ucide-34235.fw' and 'why doesn't my wireless card work?!'
The link to Debian's actual announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20101215
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I can think of at least two distros (gNewSense: http://www.gnewsense.org/ and Trisquel: http://trisquel.info/) that are the result of people working diligently to comb through the entire Ubuntu distro (not just the kernel) and checking modules/programs/packages for license compatibility. Binary blobs and other non-free kernel modules have always been a concern.
Bravo!
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Your post isn't even remotely relevant to the topic. Debian never has, and never will, ship binary nvidia drivers, these need to be installed after your base system is up and running and you've turned on the non-free repository. Basic display drivers or nouveau will work without closed source firmware.
-- Linux user #369862
So they are switching to BSD, I take it?
No, they are shipping a Linux system that doesn't run under any recent hardware.
Not that bad, assuming someone else will write a script that configures the system and loads all proprietary firmware.
I guess we need both kinds of people, the idealists that keep the system clean and the pragmatists that make the system work. Without them we would either be at the mercy of Microsoft or struggling to boot The Hurd.
HURD might be finished if Linux hadn't attracted all the developer attention that wasn't going to the 386BSD derivatives.
From the Debian site:
"In accordance with the Debian Social Contract, we acknowledge that some users require the use of works that do not conform to the DFSG and that those works might include non-free firmware bits. For the time being, we have added to the "non-free" area of our archives alternative installation images and additional packages for Debian Squeeze, that include non-free firmware bits needed to enable specific pieces of hardware. They are not part of Debian, they should be looked for explicitly by interested users, and we cannot support them to the same extent of Free firmware as we do not have access to the corresponding source code. We encourage hardware manufacturers to release only DFSG-free firmware and we cannot accept other kind of firmware as part of Debian."
The sky is, in fact, not falling...
Except one of those 14 packages is a meta-package with about 75 binary firmwares, including microcode for all Radeon cards for example.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
My take on this: Debian is much more tied to the FSF philosophy than most of the other distros. That's their way of doing things. That means that the baseline distribution needs to be Free Software.
I see two major points of this kind of effort:
1. We get to see how functional entirely Free systems really are. Maybe you don't need the latest and greatest nVidia drivers to still have a machine that does what you need it to do.
2. In an absolutely Free Software world, the binary blobs and the like were stopgap measures at best. This could potentially motivate people to make Free replacements.
Now, both of these assume that you have the goal of running entirely Free Software. But if you have that goal, then this is completely logical and worthwhile.
I am officially gone from
This is the result of a few years of work by Alexandre Oliva (FSFLA), who worked on the Linux-libre project and travelled to give presentations about the amount of non-free software in the default Linux kernel.
http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
http://www.fsfla.org/svnwiki/selibre/linux-libre/
(it's also generally thanks to the gNewSense guys, Paul O'Malley & Brian Brazil in Ireland, who worked on the general issue of non-free software in distros, but the specific work on the kernel was championed by Alexandre.)
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Non-free, closed-source binary blobs running on the CPU in the kernel are bad, I fully agree. They can corrupt system memory in terrible, subtle ways, and without the source code it's nearly impossible to diagnose problems. Non-free, closed-source binary blobs running on an external device with completely separate microcontroller, RAM, etc? What's wrong with that?
The whole point of having firmware in an external device is to separate/wall-off the functionality of that device from the general-purpose CPU and memory. In fact I can't think of a single device in a modern computer system that doesn't have some sort of firmware. Not all devices have loadable firmware like the ones Debian is targeting, but who gives a crap if it's loadable or not? In fact I would rather that every device have loadable (or at least flashable) firmware so that I can upgrade it or get bugfixes from the vendor.
The usual argument against these firmwares goes something like, "IO devices have access to full system memory, and are thus unsafe unless we see their firmware." Well, any IO device has access to system memory whether or not it has firmware. A buggy piece of firmware-free hardware can just as easily scribble on anything in memory or generate a flood of interrupts or whatever as something with firmware. This requirement is tantamount to requiring all the RTL for every device attached to the computer, which is certainly not going to happen.
That's not necessarily true. A lot of very common modern hardware runs on open drivers. The only places where there's any real trouble is graphics and wifi. As graphics go, Intel is fully open (aside from the GMA 500) and you'd be surprised how good their recent chips have gotten. The GMA 945 stuff, frankly, gave them a bad rep they don't really deserve anymore. But still, if you want top of the line, you'll probably want to go with an AMD or nVidia card, and a closed driver.
As wifi goes, there are plenty of choics out there you can get that are supported by a fully open driver. I have a DLink wireless-n card in my desktop that's supported wonderfully by the fully open ath9k driver. You don't need a firmware blob or anything.
So, the situation is wrt hardware is much better than it has been, and if you're the sort of person who cares about purity you can achieve it with a small amount of effort.
Thankfully, us ideologues do exist and are willing to fight against computer proprietarization while we still can and aren't going to wait until everyone is running an iPad-like walled garden with the US government holding a backdoor key. These things do have long-term consequences.
They gave us the microcode, but not the source used to compile the microcode. It's basically a blob that runs on the GPU parsing command packets and executing them. So while they've documented the command packets, there's another level of code between it and the hardware. Exactly like how CPUs have microcode to execute x86/x86_64 commands, the only difference is that on GPUs they're loaded after the system is booted by the driver. It doesn't really make the GPU closed source any more than Intel or AMD are closed source CPUs, but if you want to get really formal about it you are distributing a non-free piece of software.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History
"At this point, I concluded I would have to write a new
compiler from scratch. That new compiler is now known as GCC; none of the
Pastel compiler is used in it, but I managed to adapt and use the C front
end that I had written."