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."

Comments

From Debian

[icebraining]

The link to Debian's actual announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20101215

Re:Will kill the project

[Beelzebud]

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...

Re:Which will essentially cause nothing more than.

[Kjella]

Except one of those 14 packages is a meta-package with about 75 binary firmwares, including microcode for all Radeon cards for example.

Re:Completely free kernel?

[Anonymous Coward]

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."