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by pnako
2243 days ago
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That page does not really offer any explanation. For all intents and purposes, firmware is like a key or a password you must supply to the device to make it work. The driver, which is indeed open-source, just says: "here, device, is the firmware you need". That's it. You are not achieving anything useful at all by making people go through some ceremony to download it separately. Maybe they just want to send the signal that people should buy devices where the firmware is already burned into ROM or ASIC or whatever? |
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Firmware is typically copyrighted, large, obfuscated, and executable on your system.
A password is a string that you can examine and offers no intrinsic threat - either exploit, or legal.
As per the link I provided to you, Debian's policy is that free firmware are shipped in the distribution -- non-free firmware requires you add the 'non-free' and/or 'contrib' parameters to your repository lists.
There is no need to wildly speculate about the motivations of the Debian team -- eg 'send a signal people should buy certain devices' -- when their motivation is explicitly stated.
The DFSG dictates non-free software will not part of the standard distribution. But they've made it easy to pull those files in (as above) via a one word addition to one line of your sources.list file.