Steve> 3. We could stop pretending that the non-free images are
Steve> unofficial, and maybe move them alongside the normal free
Steve> images so they're published together. This would make them
Steve> easier to find for people that need them, but is likely to
Steve> cause users to question why we still make any images without
Steve> firmware if they're otherwise identical.
TL;DR: Because I think promoting discussion about free software is
valuable, because I think a subset of our users care about fully free
media, and because I think the archive split is unnecessary and divisive
I support this option.
Steve, I think I strongly prefer this option for a number of reasons:
First, the ideological questions are important to who we are.
I actually think having our users ask these questions can be valuable
provided that we can answer them in ways that are not confusing.
Some of our users care deeply about being able to get a free system, and
I think it's valuable to support them.
I remember a discussion with John Sullivan at DebConf. He was talking
how Debian didn't
do a great job of meeting the needs of freedom-focused users.
After I started talking to John about what that might look like; I
cannot remember how much of our conversation was public and how much was
on the hallway track.
I pointed out that Debian was unlikely to remove non-free firmware
support from the installer and asked what we could do to make things
better without making them worse for other users.
One valuable suggestion was to make sure users could easily select
freedom if that's what they wanted.
So I think a free installation image is important.
It's even useful for qemu, for people like Purism, and the like.
Choosing this approach avoids deciding how to split the archive.
I actually think that split will be divisive and since I think it is
unnecessary given the above I'd rather avoid it.
So How Could it Work
=====================
First, within the project, Debian remains 100% free.
We produce two images.
One is just Debian.
One is Debian plus other things.
I don't think that's the best way to market things to our users, but I
do think that's the best way for us to think about it internally.
Externally, I think the trick is to come up with labels to help our
users understand what is going on.
Things like
Debian Hardware Enablement
Debian with Hardware Support
Debian Plus
For the free image
Pure Debian
Debian Libre
Deb ian Building Block
I also think that we need to bite the bullet and explicitly say that for
most users, the non-free image is preferred.
We also need to make the non-free image significantly more prominent
than the free image.
I think we can have a link to a FAQ discussing the issues, but we need
to get to a place where what the average user finds is the non-free
image.
So, I do think we'll need a GR because we will never get consensus on
that.
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