Comment 26 for bug 179139

I'm glad to accept that you have no personal interest in pursuing this. That's fine since AFAIU you are not the sole maintainer of the linux-firmware package. Yet I do hope that maybe someone else from the Ubuntu kernel-team may find interest in this.

Debian already splits all non-free firmware into seperate packages. They then provide
http://packages.debian.org/de/sid/firmware-linux-nonfree
depending on all these separate packages, yet which also depends on the DSFG compliant firmware, which is combined in
http://packages.debian.org/de/sid/firmware-linux-free

What this report is asking for, is for Ubuntu to do the something similar. I (and possibly others) assumed that the Ubuntu split of linux-firmware and linux-firmware-nonfree would mirror this. But I suppose that doesn't seem to be the case. Yet I would expect it would be easy for Ubuntu as a Debian derivative to build on the current Debian infrastructure.

Fedora has explicitly exempted proprietary Firmware from the thier Free and Open Source Software policy.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Forbidden_items so it may be that from the large distribution, Debian may be the only one insuring that proprietary firmware is not included in their main repository.

But indeed, if, as you suggest, this split were already done upstream and upstream would provide seperate source packages, it would make it a lot easier for any distribution to offer their users a free operating system.

I doubt that asking any specific existing maintainer to do this extra work will be helpful. But if we could get someone (either from Debian, from libre-kernel contributors or the many Debian/Ubuntu derivatives which try to provide a Free Software distribution) to help Ben Hutschings and David Woodhouse provide seperate upstream packages (or host support to split the firmware for packaging), they may find it acceptable and helpful for this group of users, who value free operating systems.

Yet the fact remains this report is about this missing split in Ubuntu. So please do not interpret it as a critique of your work (which is very much appreciated!) if I reopen this report. It is merely an articulation of Ubuntu users' (and in my case canonical customers') request for providing a free operating system.

Thank you for your time!