General Resolution: Handling source-less firmware in the Linux kernel

Time Line

Proposal and amendment Wednesday, 30th August, 2006 Wednesday, 27th September, 2006
Discussion Period: Thursday, 28th September, 2006 Saturday, 7th October, 2006
Voting Period Sunday, 8th October, 00:00:00 UTC, 2006 Sunday, 15th October, 00:00:00 UTC, 2006

Proposer

Frederik Schueler [fs@debian.org]

Seconds

  1. Manoj Srivastava [srivasta@debian.org]
  2. Steve Langasek [vorlon@debian.org]
  3. Frank Küster [frank@debian.org]
  4. Bill Allombert [ballombe@debian.org]
  5. Bastian Blank [waldi@debian.org]
  6. MJ Ray [mjr@debian.org]
  7. Aníbal Monsalve Salazar [anibal@debian.org]
  8. Daniel Ruoso [ruoso@debian.org]

Text

Choice 1. The actual text of the resolution is as follows. Please note that this does not include preludes, prologues, any preambles to the resolution, post-ambles to the resolution, abstracts, fore-words, after-words, rationales, supporting documents, opinion polls, arguments for and against, and any of the other important material you will find on the mailing list archives. Please read the debian-vote mailing list archives for details.

Release Etch even with kernel firmware issues

  1. We affirm that our Priorities are our users and the free software community (Social Contract #4);

  2. We acknowledge that there is a lot of progress in the kernel firmware issue; however, it is not yet finally sorted out;

  3. We assure the community that there will be no regressions in the progress made for freedom in the kernel distributed by Debian relative to the Sarge release in Etch

  4. We give priority to the timely release of Etch over sorting every bit out; for this reason, we will treat removal of sourceless firmware as a best-effort process, and deliver firmware in udebs as long as it is necessary for installation (like all udebs), and firmware included in the kernel itself as part of Debian Etch, as long as we are legally allowed to do so, and the firmware is distributed upstream under a license that complies with the DFSG.

Amendment Proposer A

Josselin Mouette [joss@debian.org]

Amendment Seconds A

  1. Pierre Habouzit [madcoder@debian.org]
  2. Julien BLACHE [jblache@debian.org]
  3. Aurelien Jarno [aurel32@debian.org]
  4. Julien Danjou [acid@debian.org]
  5. Clément Stenac [zorglub@debian.org]

Amendment Text A

Choice 2. The actual text of the resolution is as follows. Please note that this does not include preludes, prologues, any preambles to the resolution, post-ambles to the resolution, abstracts, fore-words, after-words, rationales, supporting documents, opinion polls, arguments for and against, and any of the other important material you will find on the mailing list archives. Please read the mailing list archives for details.

Special exception to DFSG #2 for firmware as long as required

THE DEBIAN PROJECT

  1. reaffirms its dedication to providing a 100% free system to our users according to our Social Contract and the DFSG; and

  2. encourages authors of all works to make those works available not only under licenses that permit modification, but also in forms that make such modifications practical; and

  3. supports the decision of the Release Team to require works such as images, video, and fonts to be licensed in compliance with the DFSG without requiring source code for these works under DFSG #2; and

  4. determines that as a special exception to DFSG #2, the source code for device firmwares contained in the kernel packages will not be required as long as there are no other technical means to install and run the Debian system on these devices.

Minimum Discussion

As per the request from the Debian Project Leader, the voting and discussion periods are one week long.

Quorum

With the current list of voting developers, we have: 

 Current Developer Count = 1000
 Q ( sqrt(#devel) / 2 ) = 15.8113883008419
 K min(5, Q )           = 5
 Quorum  (3 x Q )       = 47.4341649025257

Quorum

Data and Statistics

For this GR, as always statistics shall be gathered about ballots received and acknowledgements sent periodically during the voting period. Additionally, the list of voters would be made publicly available. Also, the tally sheet may also be viewed after to voting is done (Note that while the vote is in progress it is a dummy tally sheet).

Majority Requirement

Amendment A (choice 2) requires a 3:1 majority, since it creates a special exception to a foundation document.

Majority

Outcome

Graphical rendering of the results

In the graph above, any pink colored nodes imply that the option did not pass majority, the Blue is the winner. The Octagon is used for the options that did not beat the default.

In the following table, tally[row x][col y] represents the votes that option x received over option y. A more detailed explanation of the beat matrix may help in understanding the table. For understanding the Condorcet method, the Wikipedia entry is fairly informative.

The Beat Matrix
 Option
  1 2 3
Option 1   196 271
Option 2 110   199
Option 3 42 111  

Looking at row 2, column 1, Special exception to DFSG 2 for firmware as long as required [3:1]
received 110 votes over Release Etch even with kernel firmware issues

Looking at row 1, column 2, Release Etch even with kernel firmware issues
received 196 votes over Special exception to DFSG 2 for firmware as long as required [3:1].

Pair-wise defeats

The Schwartz Set contains

The winner

Debian uses the Condorcet method for voting. Simplistically, plain Condorcets method can be stated like so :
Consider all possible two-way races between candidates. The Condorcet winner, if there is one, is the one candidate who can beat each other candidate in a two-way race with that candidate. The problem is that in complex elections, there may well be a circular relationship in which A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A. Most of the variations on Condorcet use various means of resolving the tie. See Cloneproof Schwartz Sequential Dropping for details. Debian's variation is spelled out in the constitution, specifically, A.6.

Manoj Srivastava