On Aug 28, Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> wrote: > Our users are finding problems with current common hardware - much of > it depends on loadable firmware. Much (most?) of that firmware is > non-free; we distribute what we can here in the non-free component of > the Debian archive. > > This now means that more and more users end up enabling non-free just > to be able to get at this firmware, which is a problem for many > reasons. Which is exactly what me and many others predicted would happen at the time the War On Some Firmwares was started. > 1. Split up non-free? While I would favour a different regime for documentation, which is what was widely believed would happen when I became a developer 18 years ago, at this point I would focus only on making downloadable firmwares more easily available to users, especially on install media. > others suggested a non-free-drivers (e.g. for the Nvidia binary I see no reason why non-free drivers should get a special treatment, also considering that nowadays only two of them are relevant: the one from AMD and the one from NVIDIA. Non-free drivers are a much bigger threat to software freedom than non-free firmwares, since they often have strong requirements like using a specific kernel release or a specific userspace ABI. > 5a. Improve documentation about free hardware > > If a user's machine includes hardware that needs non-free firmware, > maybe we could suggest known-good alternatives that would offer > similar functionality without the problematic firmware. Such hardware would still (almost always) not be free, since it would come anyway with plenty of proprietary firmwares in it. I strongly object to mischaracterize this kind of hardware as free, and I also do not see any reason why it should be favoured over hardware whose firmwares are provided by the OS. (Also, when people talk about free hardware they usually refer to the CPU and boards design as well.) -- ciao, Marco
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