A long thread at LXer about whether or not Debian should include unsourced binary blobs in its kernel had some commenters if not exactly singing the praises of totally free GNU/Linux distro gNewSense, then at least humming those praises.
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stargrave
15 years 15 weeks 2 days 17 hours ago
Tigon3 is not free
Permission is hereby granted for the distribution of this firmware data in hexadecimal or equivalent format, provided this copyright notice is accompanying it.
Firmware data itself is a software. Hexadecimal and equivalent format is binary format, object code. Object code itself can not be free, there is no source code, that has to be accessible in free software. So this driver is not free software and can not be included in gNewSense.
Some reference to Tigon3 driver freenes is here: http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/net/wired-ethernet
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Happy hacking