On 30.05.2022 09:36, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:
On Sun, May 29, 2022 at 05:33:21PM -0400, Bobby wrote:There are definitely people who use forks because it's easier to install non-free firmware. What's the problem with that? Let them use forks. A distro can't be all things to all people.This would mean almost officially dropping support for user computers and, as I've heard, many of the servers. It's certainly possible but I'm afraid this will lead to even fewer new contributors to Debian.
As a person who's handling a lot of servers, I can tell that most high performance hardware is running either load-on-boot (generally ethernet and other network cards) or persistent (generally storage and RAID contollers) non-free firmware blobs.
First category can perform basic tasks without firmware, but servers being servers, this low performance mode is undesirable barring light-load servers which is both a minority and a contradiction to the word server in my profession.
Also, this persistent firmware is meant to be updated throughout the life of the hardware (5-10 years in normal cases). This is why there's fwupd which can manage this upgrade process very elegantly.
Debian is unique in this area, and it would be a shame to sacrifice that and make it just like all the rest. And it's unclear what benefit there is to attracting a larger and larger userbase as a bottom-line. It is not a commercial project, so they will not be paying customers. The best-case scenario is that people are attracted to making contributions or becoming more interested in free software, which I thought was the main goal. So if that isn't prioritized, what's the point?I'm afraid that not providing hardware support is not the same as prioritizing free software, or even free hardware.
While I proposed a different way for supporting this binary blobs and defended it rather strongly in this mailing list, I'd love to see Debian support more hardware.
On the other hand, I still hold the view that inclusion of this firmware should be in line with the due-diligence Debian is famous for. i.e. Labeling non-free firmware correctly, and giving the user freedom to not install them, even if this cripples the target hardware in question.
Cheers, Hakan