Re: Making Debian available
Bjørn wrote:
>Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> writes:
>
>> Marc Haber wrote:
>>>
>>>I was not aware of that feature. It is good to have that, but I would
>>>be embarrassed to seriously suggest this way because we can't manage
>>>to get WLAN working in the installer for political reasons.
>>
>> Are we seriously just going to describe our Free Software goals as
>> "political reasons"? Should we just abandon them?
>
>FWIW, I did not read Marc that way.
Fair enough.
>Somehow, the Free Software goals have been interpreted to mean that
>there is a difference in "free" between firmware on device internal
>flash and firmware on host ssd. This makes no sense from a technical
>point of view. Which makes the interpretation political if we assume
>that the decision is made by otherwise sane people ignoring technical
>arguments.
To a simple end user, there might not be a difference. They have
firmware for their device.
However, in the latter case Debian has shipped non-free stuff. That is
a big shift in our position. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying this
is an impossible place for us to go to. But before we do that we
should have an open and honest debate about it.
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com
"You can't barbecue lettuce!" -- Ellie Crane
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