Hi all, While firmware is the most important category of software not available in Debian main needed by Debian users at install time, there are others. Some that I can think of are drivers and accessibility aids, for eg: The broadcom-sta-dkms Broadcom WiFi driver is only in non-free. The mbrola-af1 Afrikaans voice is in non-free and the mbrola text to speech system that uses it is in contrib. There are probably situations where non-redistributable firmware or software is required at install time, but is available for download or available from the preinstalled OS on a device. I have the impression that Android devices and Apple M1/M2 are examples of the latter. There are many Android devices where non-redistributable non-Linux software or services are required to unlock or jailbreak a device before the Debian installer can be run. There are always going to be situations where non-main software is required to enable installation or usage of Debian. Constraining the use of non-main software within the installer to firmware only means that installation is not possible for some people. On the other hand for some people acceptability of non-free software ends at firmware. Other people prefer to not use non-free firmware either. Other people choose features no matter what license they come under[1]. So there are a continuum of needs for non-free software. Currently Debian is supporting only two groups, proposing to drop one of those groups and neglecting some other groups. Debian could instead aim to increase the set of people who are served by our installation tools and distribution. That would entail keeping the current free installer, altering the existing non-free installer to only install firmware, adding additional non-free installers and additional tools for other operating systems. Of course there are likely not enough volunteers to work on these issues, so this mail serves mainly to reframe the discussion to orient it within the wider spectrum of opinions on non-free software and wider range of issues that people face installing or using Debian. 1. I expect Debian lost a lot of gaming users to distros that install the non-free nvidia driver by default where needed. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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