On Tue, 2022-08-23 at 19:04 +0200, Vincent Bernat wrote: > On 2022-08-23 18:50, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > > I mean, DSC#1 says that "Debian will remain 100% free" - how is > > that possible if an official part of Debian is omitted? > > Or how is it possible for the firmware-containing image to be free? > > If we consider firmware (not running on the CPU) to not be software.
We decided that all of Debian, including non-software such as documentation, images, game data, ... should be under a free license. So "not software" doesn't make a difference. However I think it's fine to include non-free data on installation media, just as one would get non-free bits when copying the Debian archive. We aren't enthusiastic about it, so we just include a small part of non-free that is practically required in many cases. > > (I only see that being possible by treating the install image as not > > part of Debian, which I consider an unacceptable interpretation). For me installation media are more or less just a glorified non-tarball of archive contents. So I apply the same standards I would apply to a tarball of the Debian archive (which would include non-free). Though I understand some people would like if non-free was removed from the archive as well (possibly to a separate archive). But reading this discussion I came up with a question: we currently ship some version of the Debian installer as part of Debian in main. There is [1] and also the debian-installer-11-netboot-amd64 packages. I'm not sure if these would also include firmware or only the "large" installation media built by the CD team? Do network install images need to include it or can they reliably download it? The audio and video examples suggest that firmware might be needed here early as well. Ansgar [1]: https://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/installer-amd64/
