On Tuesday, March 11, 2025 8:29:24 AM MST Simon Josefsson wrote: > Aurélien COUDERC <li...@coucouf.fr> writes: > > Le 10 mars 2025 11:56:28 GMT+01:00, Simon Josefsson <si...@josefsson.org> a écrit : > >>https://www.gnu.org/distros/optionally-free-not-enough.html > >> > >>https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/install-fest-devil.html > >> > > … of course … that's where the core of the disagreement lies ! > > Right, I think agreement (or disagreement) with those essays explains a > lot of what practical choices you make. > > > We're not a religion, we're just building a distro. > > I'm not sure what to make of that. Are you saying that Guix, Trisquel > etc who strive towards these concepts are not distro's? > > One person's religion is another person's reasonable beliefs. I'm not > sure who has the authority to judge. I'm sure some would dismiss the > DFSG as religion, even if we happen to like it here. > > It is fine for the Debian community to dismiss the arguments described > in the links above. This appears to be the case, although I hear some > voices that are open to change. > > However if Debian dismiss those ideas, the argument that the fully free > installer doesn't exist because "nobody is working on this, go create > them and it will happen" does not seem valid to me. My reading is that > these images doesn't exist because Debian had a vote saying they should > not exist. I hope this will change in the future. Creating them won't > change the decision, but it may be input to renewed discussion.
I want to say that I agree with Simon on this. What we really need is the open hardware movement to catch up with the open software movement. That will take 20 to 30 years as the open hardware movement is just getting started. As many people have already pointed out, in most cases it isn’t practical to operate the hardware that is generally available without the use of non-free firmware. My sense is the majority of these people, perhaps all of them, are not saying they prefer hardware with non-free firmware or that they don’t support the ideals of the open hardware movement. Rather, they are making a pragmatic statement of the current state of affairs. To a certain degree, promoting official installer images without non-free firmware next to installer images with non-free firmware can raise awareness of the problem. To another degree, it probably wouldn’t do anything right now except confuse some subset of users and require extra effort from those generating the images. Debian is simply too small of an organization to make a very big splash by such a move. As has already been mentioned, nothing of substance has changed since Debian held a GR on this issue. However, if down the road open hardware with free firmware became more widely available (I’m looking at you, RISC-V, although I understand that the most likely short-term outcome is that companies will produce non-free firmware for their RISC-V processors), then it might be worth reopening the issue for consideration. -- Soren Stoutner so...@debian.org
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
