Paul Wise wrote: > >On Tue, 2022-04-19 at 01:27 +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote: > >> There are a number of issues here that make developers and users unhappy: > >There are a couple more issues related to unredistributable firmware:
Oh, I'm quite sure there are more than that even! :-) >Some firmware is only available in the operating system preinstalled on >the device and needs to be manually extracted before d-i is run, >potentially even only from processes running on the preinstalled >operating system in cases where the storage must be wiped (such as >Android devices) before an alternative OS like Debian can be installed. >IIRC there is some laptop WiFi firmware that is like this. Yup. >Some firmware is not redistributable and is only available in >proprietary drivers on websites and is hard to extract from those >drivers. IIRC some of the proprietary nvidia firmware for use by the >libre nouveau GPU driver is like this, both signed firmware for very >new nvidia hardware and unsigned firmware for very old nvidia hardware, >although the firmware for the old nvidia hardware has libre firmware in >nouveau, but the libre firmware is/was buggier than the proprietary >firmware. The tools for extracting the old firmware aren't in Debian. Yup. I don't see us fixing *all* of these issues any time soon. But in those cases where we *can* redistribute firmware we can make things easier for users who need it. And *then* we can explain to them why the non-free firmware is bad for their freedom, with examples of what they can do to improve things. -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com "We're the technical experts. We were hired so that management could ignore our recommendations and tell us how to do our jobs." -- Mike Andrews