Ubuntu tainting the kernel with proprietary drivers ?

[Lee Revell]

On Sun, 2006-06-11 at 03:13 -0600, Conrad Knauer wrote:
> Now, what bothers me about the article you quoted was that he went
> further, claiming (based on a forum post) that "the proprietary
> firmware are not in pool/restricted/, they are included in
> linux-image-2.6.15-23-686_2.6.15-23.39_i386.deb, the main kernel
> package" 

It's important to make the distinction between proprietary *drivers* and
proprietary *firmware*.  The former is linked into the kernel and runs
on the same CPU in the same address space.  The latter runs on a
separate device on the other side of a bus.

If including proprietary firmware constitutes a "non-free OS" then you
must also consider running a completely open source OS on a machine with
a proprietary BIOS to be a non-free OS, or communicating with a Windows
box across the network to taint the system.

There is a good reason that loading a binary-only driver taints the
kernel but loading non-free firmware onto a connected device does not.

Debian takes a rather extreme position on this, which is not shared by
Linus and many others.

Lee