On Mon, Dec 4, 2017 at 7:39 PM, Jonathan Dowland wrote: > Are we promoting hardware that *doesn't* require non-free firmware (not > drivers, there is an important distinction) at the moment?
On our website, we don't promote hardware, just people/companies that you can pay to install Debian for you: https://www.debian.org/distrib/pre-installed On our wiki, there are numerous install howto pages but we don't separate those by non-free firmware requirement, just by vendor. https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn > Where are we prominently explaining the problem? In our install manual at least: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch02s02.html.en https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch02s03.html.en > Where are the links to the unencumbered hardware that > people could/should be using instead? We can definitely do better here, especially after promoting h-node in a press release: https://www.debian.org/News/2014/20140908 > Where are the Debian developers working on better supporting such > hardware, where are the blog posts on Planet Debian about it, where are > the unencumbered hardware platforms being distributed with Debian > pre-installed? mafm posted about his work on the RISC-V architecture port a while ago, which has the potential to be > Instead we prevent close to 100% of our new potential users from > installing on their laptops due to the firmware issue. Those users are > much more likely to go elsewhere than to be educated as to the merits of > free software and unencumbered hardware. We can definitely do better here and I think it is feasible to do both, as mentioned in my other mail. > Are *you* using non-free firmware? Unfortunately yes, all of the devices I've acquired in recent history have required firmware from Debian non-free and also had embedded non-free firmware. Multiple devices even ran Linux and most of those were GPL-violating, one even violated the BSD license for some of the userland. https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise#contribnonfree > I can understand the discomfort of grasping this nettle. But are you > completely closed to the idea of revisiting our core value documents > at all? The Social Contract and DFSG were written a long time ago. > Should the project not be open to looking at what our collective values > are today, or are we beholden to the terms layed down by braver people, > all those years ago? Personally, I think the values written down in the SC/DFSG are not where we are going wrong, but our execution of them could use some work. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
