On Wed, 2 Jul 2014 10:24:31 +0800 Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> wrote: > Hi all, Hi Paul, [...] > What should Debian's strategy/policy wrt platform firmware be? > > Currently it seems to be just leave the platform firmware alone and > leave it up to the user to research if they can install libre > firmware. > > I'm thinking we should promote using Free Software where possible and > packaged versions of that Free Software where possible. Due to the > possibility of unforeseeable circumstances, that promotion should > probably only consist of a default-to-no suggestion to replace > existing platform firmware if only intending to use Debian on the > device. [Ok, I don't think I've ever actually publicly expressed my opinion of my past employer, but at least regarding this topic I can now say that they were extremely short-sighted.] The past experience with the Genesi EfikaMX fiasco -removal from mainline kernel- has taught me one important lesson: deviation from mainline can only be a bad thing in the long run. Vendors who provide their own uboot/kernel forks are left with the burden of maintaining them and once they don't have capable engineers of doing that anymore the support is just left to rot or removed altogether. Without going into details, suffice to say that I was the one to constantly urge the company to hire known and competent contractors (I've even pointed to the right direction) to properly upstream support for the platform into both uboot but particularly into kernel. Of course I was never heard, management just ignored my suggestion, mainly because of cost issues -I don't think that's a valid reason to be honest, but it was not my money in the end. Anyway, that never happened, and the existing engineers more often than not, either did not have the experience or skills to do it -like me- or when they did, they lacked the time because of other pressing issues -like getting support for the upcoming hardware into the by-that-time-ancient selected kernel. The end result was that while EfikaMX was quite a popular device in 2010-11, since last year it ended up being nothing more than a doorstop because of mainline support -or lack thereof. It saddens me because I still have many of those devices all in perfectly working order, but I can't run any recent kernel (the last version is a 3.8 that I hacked together from various patches from rtp and others, but it's a terrible hack), let alone install recent Debian on them. And don't even mention DT for the Efikas. And given the abundance of properly supported hardware nowadays, it's even harder to convince people with skills to work towards fixing the situation. Anyway, given the above experience, and given that most vendors stop supporting their own devices after only a couple of years -if it even reaches that long- and users would be lucky to get any future support at all, I would actually suggest that Debian goes pro-active on this and actually promotes a default-to-yes suggestion for removal the existing firmware. It's definitely going to piss off some vendors, but in the long run this actually suits them better as well, as they will get longer support from their products and it *might* push them towards better mainlining of their patches into u-boot. I obviously don't expect everyone to share my view on this matter, but since I and many others got bitten by this lack of foresight on behalf of this vendor I think it's important to at least share this view with all of you people, perhaps some other vendors might also be reading this list. I don't have any expectations that they will somehow change their strategies, but hopefully it may give some extra incentives to think twice about holding back from proper mainlining in both uboot and kernel. My 2c. Konstantinos
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