[Mageia-dev] [RFC] radeon firmware in non-free

[Johnny A. Solbu]

On Wednesday 30 May 2012 10:38, Thierry Vignaud wrote:
> So there're two kinds of Linux distro:

I beg to differ, there are three kinds, using your way of counting.

> - those who provides free & proprietary drivers
> - those who only provides free drivers, with the needed firmwares

- those who only provides free drivers, without proprietary firmwares

You have Ututo, Blag, gNewSense and the other FSF approved distros which takes every care in ensuring that No proprietary drivers of any kind, including firmware, is not available. They even remove the few proprietary drivers which are included in the upstream kernel. (Debian also does this as of version 6, in the main tree.)
If some hardware does not work without having a proprietary firmware or driver, then that particular hardware does not work. Period. The user must install a proprietary driver them selves afterwards if they want to use it, and the distro does not help them in any way to achieve this.

-- 
Johnny A. Solbu
PGP key ID: 0xFA687324
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