The Debian Release Manager Anthony Towns recently summarised the position after a long thread and later updated the Release Critical Issues for Sarge document. The kernel maintainer responded with a message Purge of firmware to recommence Mostly the intention long-term seems to be to rip out the dubious binary firmwares in the source in hexdump.c format and turn them into loaded at runtime forms using the new firmware loading APIs, passing the patches "upstream" to the Linux Kernel maintainers.