Hi, On 3/10/25 20:41, Andrey Rakhmatullin wrote:
We're not obligated to validate their questionable choices in buying hardware that ships with non-free firmware, or apologize for the bad experience they have when upstream changes something they don't like. It is not our duty as volunteers to compensate for the shortcomings of companies, especially companies that use our volunteer time without compensation -- we're the *free* software community, not the *gratis* software community.
This is also an old argument. Some rebuttals included "this didn't work so far", "good luck getting fully open firmware in sectors where it's literally impossible" and "please don't call things users have no choice over "questionable choices"".
That's my point though: the exact same rebuttals were presented in the 1990ies about getting drivers under a free license, and yet here we are, with excellent driver support for all but a few holdouts that users understand to be problematic due to the politics of the vendors.
We've reached the point where people are shitting on nV for the quality of their drivers, and a kernel that has closed-source drivers loaded is "tainted", and the last release in which we shipped ndiswrapper was buster.
This happened precisely because of free software zealotry. Free firmware will happen the same way: by users understanding that non-free offerings are inferior because you need to live with all the flaws they have -- and a large part of that is that the free software community is not apologizing for the experiences users have with closed-source drivers.
Simon
