Re: Possible draft non-free firmware option with SC change
Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> writes:
> I recall that it took ~5 years until hardware (usually audio, video,
> network cards) was well supported with stable releases of free software
> distributions in the 1990's. Often it was never possible to get some
> hardware to work with free software, especially laptops. This has
> pretty much been the same since then.
I think what you're missing is that this changed about ten or fifteen
years ago. I can now buy a new off-the-shelf computer and run Debian on
it *immediately* because Linux now supports modern hardware and you don't
have to run ancient gear.
This is HUGE for free software because it increases our potential audience
and reach by orders of magnitude. It lets Debian serve as the basis for
modern server farms. It lets the sort of early adopters who tend to bring
other people along with them to use free software because it works on the
new, shiny things they're interested in. The days where you had to point
people at extensive tables and wikis to figure out if Linux is even an
option for them are long gone, and good riddance.
These are people we always *wanted* to reach, and *tried* to reach with
wikis of non-free drivers and configuration options and kernel patches and
unreleased tarballs, and now *can* reach directly without all of that
tedious nonsense that most people hated dealing with. This is an immense
positive development for free software; it upends the perception that
Linux is something that only hobbyists can run on ancient hardware and
that's unsuitable for any serious work (an opinion that was nearly
universal 20 years ago).
Sometimes it feels to me like people think the mere presence of any
non-free software in a system will interact with our message like
antimatter to matter, and because non-free firmware was used to get Debian
running, the user will now think "oh, free software is useless." (I would
go so far as to say that this often seems like the official position of
the FSF.) But this is nonsense. I cannot overstate how much the typical
user does not care about firmware and how little it matters for their
perceptions of the merits or lack thereof of free software. To them, it's
an implementation detail of their hardware. The evaluation of free
software succeeds or fails based on the applications and development
enviroment and services they're directly interacting with. All they want
from the hardware is to work.
That doesn't mean non-free firmware is fine; it's not, and ideally we
would have free firmware. (I have a much longer rant, though, about how
ahistorical it is to think that non-free firmware is a step backwards,
when it's the exact opposite.) But it's not the front on which the
ideological fight over the merits of software freedom is fought. It is,
at best, a tedious and irritating distraction.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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