Bug#809705: general: let people use non-free software but opt-out of non-open software

[Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar@debian.org>]

Philippe Cerfon <philcerf@gmail.com> writes:
> On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 8:45 AM, Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net> wrote:
>> Philippe Cerfon:
>> Your second item has been brought up before with different
>> focus/rationale/purpose.  At least I remember there being an interest in
>> splitting "non-free" into "non-free/firmware" vs. various other non-free
>> sub components.
>
> Well, I think splitting of just the firmware sounds far less appealing.
> Actually in some cases having a non open firmware may not be *that*
> big security issues, e.g. when it's used to be loaded in some external
> device (something like ColorHug) and for many other firmwares there is
> simply no alternative (or e.g. one won't have networking).
> So while it would make of course to split of the non-open firmware
> packages as well, the whole effort seems to rather only make sense if
> really everything non-open is split off.

Then why should one have "non-open" at all?  The argument was that this
somehow brings some sort of "security" by being able to audit things
(though the license may probably still forbid you from doing so or
publishing your results, its non-free after all), but then there are
"non-open" packages where this doesn't matter anyway...

The reason for the "non-free-firmware" component is the admission that
in many cases non-free firmware is required to correctly use the
hardware.  While this is not ideal, we want people to be able to use
Debian on their hardware with the minimum amount of non-free things[1].

I don't think Debian should bother with differentiating between levels
of non-freeness on the level of components besides this: after all
Debian is about free software, not the various levels of non-free
things.  Having them on the level of debtags or similar is way more
flexible and more likely to suit different uses.

Otherwise we end up with "non-free", "non-open", "non-free-data",
"non-free-documentation", "non-free-firmware", "non-open-firmware",
"non-open-data" and so on.  Just imaging a sources.list with 10
different non-free component and only one free component ("main") ;)

Ansgar

  [1] Personally I don't see much of a difference between having such
      non-free blobs supplied by the operating system or having them
      stored in some sort of ROM, though the FSF sees that different.
      This should be unrelated to the decision whether to provide
      non-free-firmware as an extra suite or not.