Re: Changing how we handle non-free firmware
Hello Simon,
Simon Richter dijo [Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 07:34:10PM +0200]:
> > I don't see a difference between having non-free files in the archive
> > and non-free files on the installation images. If having individual
> > non-free files was not acceptable then we would have to define the
> > archive not part of Debian as well.
>
> Yes, and the DSC explicitly does that in paragraph 5.
>
> That is my point: with the current DSC, the Installer images cannot be "part
> of Debian" according to this definition, because that would misrepresent the
> license as being DFSG compliant.
I thank you for bringing forward this issue.
I agree that the non-free firmware packages cannot and should not be
considered as part of Debian. They are not free. If we get a bug
report, we can only (in the best case) forward it to the firmware
upstreams -- and I expect most of them will not be very interested in
patching. We cannot offer our traditional support level for the
firmware we ship.
But "our priorities are our users and free software", right?
Increasingly, if we don't ship non-free firmware, we will lose the
users who don't have at least decent support for their hardware. And
free software will lose as well, because unhappy users are unlikely to
return.
FWIW, I feel the installer (and the install media) can still be seen
as "part of Debian" -- but they will *include* bits (that can be
disabled) that don't meet our standards.
> Thus, we need a third kind of software between "vetted to be DFSG compliant
> as promised in the DSC" and "you're entirely on your own because this
> package is not officially part of Debian" for this to be useful for users.
Well, we do have contrib ("yes, you know, this is DFSG-compliant as
promised in the DSC, but you might need some ugly bits for it to be
useful"). But this is not the main point of this mail.
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