RMS originally worked on a non-free system when building GNU. He has decided that it is possible to run only free software (and shows us that it is true), but not everyone agrees that it is realistic: On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 09:37:33PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > I'm particularly concerned about keeping Debian a viable distribution > for enterprise and large-scale server deployments, where, for better > or worse, a well-integrated way to add non-free firmware is simply > mandatory in practice right now. On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 06:11:34PM +0000, Neil McGovern wrote: > I would love to run Debian on all systems without the need for > firmware on open hardware, but that day has not yet come. Until it > does[0], we should keep section 5. This sounds reasonable; just like RMS, people and companies need or want to use hardware that is not supported by free software. Everyone seems to mention firmware; I don't hear anyone saying we really need to support games with non-free game data, or shareware programs. And I agree. So to the candidates: can you please let us know whether you would be in favor of restricting non-free, so that it will only contain things that are required for making hardware work, and for which there is no fully functional free alternative? If not, do you think restricting it on other grounds is a good idea? If so, which criteria would you suggest? This is also related to Paul's point: On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 02:16:09PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > Add an extra component that d-i could add to sources.list when > non-free firmware is needed, instead of adding all of non-free. > > Likewise for drivers, GNU documentation, the web, tools for external > APIs and other common categories of non-free things. (Aside: I like all the ideas in Paul's mail, but this one is relevant here.) Would you be in favor of such categories of non-free, where we can perhaps include some of them (firmware) by default on installation media? Thanks, Bas
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