On 2022-08-22 22:13, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
So there may be some unintended consequences where new users may associate "100% free software" with "not functional" and "induces pain and frustration", such that it might end up *hurting* the cause of free software.
Well, that's the truth when it comes to laptops. I myself consider that Debian is harming free software by making it difficult to deal with this issue, leaving the user with broken hardware that is working correctly on Windows. Even in unstable, we ship out-of-date firmware. For example, rtl_bt/rtl8761bu_fw.bin is outdated and the associated adapter may not work correctly on resume. Just putting the up-to-date version shipped in the latest tarball from the linux-firmware repository is enough to make it work correctly.
Back to the vote, another option would be to not consider firmware (not running on the CPU) as software and we keep the 100% free software images with non-free firmware included. This implies this new component should only include firmware (there were discussions to broaden its use in the past).
I can briefly rehash the rationale: firmware were previously shipped in a ROM with the hardware and they have been moved to being loaded by the OS instead for various reasons (cost, ease of update), but this does not fundamentally change their nature, except that we have to distribute them. There is no difference in the level of "freeness" we provide to the user, but there is a huge difference in usability.