  Re: LCC and blobs  Tim Cutts wrote:  Maybe not most, but many,
and the proportion is increasing. If we force these into
contrib, then a lot of hardware will not work out of the box for
people trying to install Debian. Especially wireless cards on
laptops.  This is likely to put people off the distribution.
This is unfortunate, but necessary. Debian does not distribute
your motherboard ROM, or any of the other burned-in firmware
that belongs on the card. This is all about distribution. Once
operational, the firmware is below the bus, outside of the
domain of our software. But it's against Debian's principles to
distribute it.  If the manufacturer wants their device to be
supported, they can put a fifty-cent FLASH chip on their
hardware and program it before the sale. Debian should be pro-
active in publishing a list of devices that require BLOBs in
their drivers, so that users are warned away from them.  There
is no denying that run-time loadable firmware is software. It is
not feasable to open the developme