Re: Reconsidering Debian’s Inclusion of Non-Free Firmware - A Call for Discussion
Hi,
On Sun, 2025-03-09 at 15:58 +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Ansgar 🙀 <ansgar@debian.org> writes:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Sun, 2025-03-09 at 14:19 +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> > > Our experience seems to differ, I now run Trisquel and Guix on many of
> > > my home and machines and servers. For my uses they all work without
> > > non-free firmware. You have to be careful about what hardware you buy,
> > > and chose your use-cases. And, yes, I use modern hardware -- i9-14900K
> > > on desktop, i7 1260P and Ultra 155H in my two most used laptops,
> > > ARS-111M-NR and Talos II on the server side, as well as a bunch of aging
> > > Dell R630's.
> >
> > This class of hardware *requires* non-free firmware. Lots of it, at
> > every system layer.
>
> Agreed.
So we agree that pretty much all hardware requires non-free firmware
these days.
> However none of that hardware require me to load non-free
> firmware from my operating system, which is my point. That situation is
> sufficient for me to accept to use the hardware and install an operating
> system built without non-free software on it.
What is the point of this then?
Does it help users to replace/rewrite non-free firmware if it is not
supplied by the operating system? Or enable the user to not use non-
free firmware? I don't think so.
The only other reason to do this seems to be free/libre-washing by
pretending the non-free firmware is not there... But I don't think that
is something useful to spend resources on (but if people want to do so
for unofficial installer images, they are of course free to do so; as
far as I understand the FSF is in favor of free/libre-washing).
Or is there some other reason to want to do this?
Ansgar
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