Re: Free Software DVD contains non-free firmware

> If you actually want the level of purity-over-practicality that your mail suggests ... that is effectively an abuse of our users

*Just pointing out the fact that at the time of 11.6.0 you didn't have a problem releasing both free and non-free version.*

Important part ^

Also, it feels like in your reply you're trying to hide or obfuscate this fact, probably because if this fact is not mentioned, your reasoning starts to work (e.g. I quote: "that is

effectively an abuse of our users").

You've provided more questionable reasoning in your previous emails, responding to which I find grossly counterproductive.

Just for the record, let me explain you what I mean exactly, because it might not have penetrated.

What I did - is read the DFSG, and IMO it follows from this document that you should have at least one official release that doesn't have closed-source, just as you did at the time of 11.6.0.

And let me break it down for you, the way I'm reading it:

1. Debian Project uses Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) to determine whether a software license is a free software license;

2. This, in turn is used to determine whether a piece of software can be included in Debian.

3. and guideline #2 is: Inclusion of source code.

IMO a natural conclusion from this guideline is that if you get a release of Debian, it should be all open source software.

Your reply to that was: "The non-free firmware is still not part of Debian proper, we just happen to distribute it alongside Debian".

And that's fine if you happen to distribute anything alongside whatever you want, and you're not called Official Debian.

The only problem with that is for some reason now you still call those releases "Official distributions" and don't provide pure free software releases anymore.

(Memo: earlier releases with non-free software were called "Unofficial").

But honestly, call them what you want, as long as you provide a pure free software release, just like you should, judging from your own manifesto.

You might have stronger reasons than those you've officially acknowledged to compromise your releases with code that you can't vouch for and you can deny knowledge of what it does exactly; but the way I see it - that's your issue and I'm not going to speculate or blame.

Maybe at some point somebody more responsible will restart proper releases in accordance with DFSG, I'll keep my hope for that.

And given the quality of your demonstrated argument and reasoning I intend to discontinue my participation in this thread, for the purpose of saving my time for more productive activities.

Again, thank you for 11.6.0 and earlier releases.

Regards, John.

On Tue, Aug 29, 2023 at 1:04 AM Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> wrote:

Birzhan Amirov <john.amirov.83@gmail.com> writes:

> I just want to use this chance to thank the entire Debian Images Team for
> many years of releasing DVDs that actually had 0 bytes of closed-source
> code.
> I have been following the project since "Jessie", and always admired your
> strict and puristic approach.
> Allow me to wish you the best of luck growing your user base.

If you actually want the level of purity-over-practicality that your
mail suggests, people have been providing it long before you took an
interest in Debian -- the FSF keeps a list of candidates:

https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

[ Oh, I see gNewSense is dead :-/ , and Trisquel is now (... erm, since
2007 ... obviously wasn't paying attention) based on Ubuntu, which
doesn't seem like the most obvious way of doing that, but whatever. ]

and while the FSF now criticises Debian primarily on the basis of
this (IMO rather minor) change in installer policy:

https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#Debian

they've always been critical of Debian, for pretty-much exactly the same
reason as this policy change occurred -- a willingness to let users
obtain a working Debian system by providing them with the chance to get
hold of non-free software as well as Debian, if that's their only choice:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220211101539/https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#Debian

so if you were expecting FSF levels of purity[1], then you probably haven't
been paying close enough attention from the start.

While looking at the FSF site, I noticed this somewhat amusing method
for reconciling these two stances:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/install-fest-devil.html

but I'm afraid I've no idea how one could implement something equivalent
in the medium of downloadable images.

I'm sure if we had a tool for converting "+firmware" to "pure" images,
we'd be publishing the checksums to the "pure" result, and making them
easy to get for those that prefer them, but nobody's yet produced such a
tool.

It really just needs someone to care enough to maintain it (or pay
someone else to do so).

I don't think we'd go back to the situation where we somehow hide the
"+firmware" images though, because we've acknowledged that that is
effectively an abuse of our users, so I would expect the FSF to be
almost exactly as grumpy even if "pure" images were easily available.

Cheers, Phil.

[1] of course, the FSF distributes documentation that is non-free by
Debian's definition (in the form of GFDL-with-immutable-sections), so
other forms of purity are also available :-)
--
Philip Hands -- https://hands.com/~phil