On 4/26/22 12:08, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:
On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 11:59:20AM +0300, Hakan Bayındır wrote:
No, they do not. Most popular devices won't work at all without non-
free firmware, including boring things such as mass storage (SD cards,
SSD, HDD, ..., and controllers), input devices (keyboards, mice, ...).
Yeah, you’re right. Since the firmware images always there and doesn’t
need to be hot-loaded by the driver itself 99% of the time (for these
classes of devices), I tend to forget about them.
Note that this fact was mentioned many times in this thread.
I personally didn't have the time to follow/reread all of the thread
unfortunately, however considering here's a development thread with a
lot of knowledgeable people, it's of course expected.
I wonder whether these “proper” firmware can be considered as part of the
hardware,
FSF and/or some FSF proponents certainly think like this. Others just
conveniently ignore it completely.
I didn't come to that point by being a FSF "proponent", but starting at
an early age with a Commodore 64, and learning that firmware is
something inside that you can't proverbially touch or update, then being
able to touch it as my knowledge accumulates and firmware becomes closer
to surface as the technology evolves.
I always believed that everything should be open and accessible before I
knew about Linux or FSF. These are just two things which align with my
values well, and I use Debian for 15 years, since it's the best aligning
distribution with my values, amongst many other things.
I have no intention to derail the discussion by moving the goalposts or
to "conveniently ignore" things.
since it’s bundled with the hardware, but not with the driver itself.
In the Linux world loadable firmware is rarely "bundled with the driver".
This includes the use case discussed in this thread.
By bundled with the driver I didn't mean "Linux World", but the bundle
you receive from the vendor, mostly for Windows environment, and the
media where the firmware lives (in the hardware vs. the driver image).
Probably the days when Linux is considered as a second class citizen by
most hardware vendors is still too ingrained in me. I wasn't clear
enough, sorry about that.
This makes matters more complicated, of course, but starting somewhere
may create the same wedging effect as in the drivers, over time.
Such arguments seem to ignore that
1) it's not about "starting somewhere" because we aren't discussing
something we will need to decide before some point in the future: the
situation exists for many years, we are discussing whether we should
change how to handle it, not how to start handling it;
2) the often mentioned expected effect on hardware manufacturers should be
already felt in some form as the status quo of not providing any non-free
firmware on the official image is many years old;
3) so far the usability of systems with the official image becomes worse,
not better, over time.
I'm aware of all three, and this is why I proposed a 6th option as my
first message to this thread, which consists of creating a tool which
combines the firmware.zip and the current free image to a USB flash
drive and directly "burn" it, as an "automagic" solution, allowing users
to assemble their images without complicating things on the policy side
much.
Again, to reiterate, I'm not "hard-against" adding firmware images to
the official ISO and asking a question about installing them during
installation, but considering the role and place of Debian among the
Linux distributions, I just want to highlight that the choices done here
will probably have a ripple effect, so we need to consider it correctly
and have to be well-aware of the ethical implications, the DFSG and the
Social Contract. And not undermine these two inadvertently with the
actions we take.
Hope it's more clear now,
Regards,
H.
