Two weeks can make a difference. We had our fortnightly core-meeting tonight. Most of the topics were over-fulfilled, so that, after 20 minutes, we set off to open discussion on releasse-flavours and related topics. The log from the meeting is, as always online.
After the meeting, another interesting discussion started, as someone brought up the issue of non-free firmware. Reason for the discussion was the fact, that users of ATI graphic-cards will only see a scrambled desktop that is utterly unusable. They would idealy need the package firmware-linux-nonfree shipped on the image. As the name suggests, it is in the non-free section and can’t be shipped if you want to follow the dfsg. Two members of the core-team said, they would ship it because users range before politics. Two others, including me, spoke up against this. I made my position on the matter clear as driven snow on 2011-07-26, long before we even decided to start this adventure. Unfortunately its in german, but google-trans should be able to get it across. Anyways, after some time we agreed, there must be a way to satisfy both groups. So, be sure we will find an acceptable solution for this.
On another topic: All those waiting for an image to test, can start holding their breath: Within the next 2 or 3 days we will provide kde/xfce images for download that i would call on the verge from alpha to beta. Mostly fully functional, but visuals as well as package-sets are up for changes still. We will contact all users in the test-team to get feedback on behaviour on different sets of hardware.