On Mon, Mar 10, 2025 at 08:36:45PM +0900, Simon Richter wrote:
The current state where we have free software drivers for a lot of hardware is the result of a lot of people investing a lot of time into creating them.In the same way, we need to do both: support our current users by allowing them to use non-free firmware with their current hardware, *and* push for new devices to have free firmware.Part of that push is informing users that what we do wrt firmware is best-effort, support for their hardware can be dropped at any point and the free software community cannot put them in control of their computing experience.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"".
-- WBR, wRAR
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