LKML thread about (re)moving firmware within the kernel

[Alexandre Oliva]

On May 31, 2008, Markus Laire <malaire at gmail.com> wrote:

> Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> And if Fedora and Debian don't care enough to ship a Free kernel that
>> already exists and is well maintained and kept up-to-date with the one
>> they've come to love, this just shows where they stand and how much
>> they value freedom.

> Do you know of any Free kernel which has record of being well
> maintained and up-to-date for some years?

IIRC linux-libre has been around for a at least couple of years, but
it might be a bit less than that.  First I heard of it, it was for
kernel 2.6.15 or so.

Nevertheless, how does that even matter?  If linux-libre were to
become unmaintained or dropped altogether, in spite of the small
amount of work it takes, since it will have tracked linux upstream
until then, those who would rather have an up-to-date non-Free kernel
than picking up the maintenance of a Free kernel might as well go back
to the non-Free Linux.  So, by using linux-libre as long as it's
maintained, what do they lose?

"It's too young" would be a very weak excuse to keep on imposing
non-Free software on all users of a distro that claims to be committed
to freedom.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}