On Monday, February 23, 2026 3:41:00 PM Mountain Standard Time Bastian Blank wrote: > > However, I do not think that everyone who has concerns about this particular > > pure blend naming issue fit into this category. > > Wow, just wow. But as you already told us that you are fluid in > violating the Debian trademark, not sure if we should be surprised. (I > think it was you that asked if a blend could contain software not in > Debian, wasn't it?)
No, it wasn’t. You must have me confused with someone else. > > But, in general, I think promoting fully free hardware and firmware is not > > as > > high on the list of priorities of the majority of the Debian community as I > > wish it were. > > I did not see you promoting free hardware? Could you share with us what > free hardware we can actually get our hands on, with links to the > VHDL/Verilog sources? I think this is part of the key problem. We are currently in the infancy of the free hardware movement. And, in many ways, it is moving backwards instead of forward. Non-free firmware being a key example. Years ago, graphics cards use small, simple firmwares or no firmware at all. All of the heavy lifting was done in the software drivers, which the graphics card companies considered proprietary, closely guarded secrets. As the free software movement grew and open source, reverse engineered graphics drivers began to gain real traction, graphics companies started moving more and more of the logic of the driver into the firmware. This allows them to produce official open source drivers while still protecting their “proprietary” functionality. In other words, the drivers have become, to a large degree, shims for loading that actual code in the firmware. There are more than one reason for putting this functionality into firmware, including performance reasons. But it makes me sad that we have allowed this to happen instead of insisting that the firmwares be fully free, with all the benefits that come from such freedom. -- Soren Stoutner [email protected]
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