On Mon, Dec 4, 2017 at 7:31 PM, Jonathan Dowland wrote: > IMHO, we need to go (more) one way or the other. We either reaffirm that > firmware is in-scope for our DFSG values and stop compromising it with > the non-free install images, or we look to revise the DFSG in line with > modern realities and can "promote" the status of the installer images > with firmware. That seems much harder: there have been brave efforts > to reform the DFSG before, not least by Ian; and they have not > succeeded. However, I think the project is healthier in one way from > those days, we've weathered some fierce debates and I think we've grown > as a project in the way we communicate together to resolve problems.
I don't like this dichotomy and I think we can do better than choosing one or the other. Instead, expose the reality of the situation to users, state Debian's position on non-free firmware, state that the practical downsides of using (or not) non-free firmware, mitigate them using more imaginative solutions where possible, give users the choice to use non-free firmware if they want to and also give them the choice to use just the firmware part of non-free by having a non-free/firmware subset. For example, we could offer the Debian installer itself or win32-loader style tools as apps on other operating systems, where they can detect the hardware present but still access the network to download firmware from Debian non-free or extract firmware from the filesystem of the operating system it runs under. This approach is practical for Windows (win32-loader or WSL), Linux/BSD distros (perhaps via Flatpak) and possible for Android (several of apps exist already, the android-sdk is being packaged) based devices right now, for macOS devices it seems a bit more tricky, perhaps Python & Tk would work as an installer bootstrap app. I guess Debian can give up on iOS devices due to lockdown (though there is one person on #debian-mobile who was working on trying to get Debian installed on an iPhone) and consoles/TVs/IoT and other "appliance"-class devices due to lockdown and/or GPL violations. https://wiki.debian.org/ChrootOnAndroid https://wiki.debian.org/AndroidTools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems > I know I've needed non-free firmware on every single laptop I've ever > used Debian with and I suspect that's true for nearly everyone. That is the nature of the hardware industry these days, except perhaps for some future corners of the RISC-V community and a few minor exceptions like carl9170.fw or open-ath9k-htc-firmware. Even hardware that allegedly "doesn't need non-free firmware" usually has it embedded instead. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
