On Mon, Feb 23, 2026 at 01:16:44PM -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote: > 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 don't think that's true. I think the majority of our community does want to promote fully free hardware and firmware, but I think there is a difference on *strategy* in getting to that place. The FSF wants you to ignore the non-free firmware that's installed inside a device, and to declare that it's "good enough" if you can pretend it's not there (*). I want us to *not pretend*. I do *not* think it is good enough to pretend it is not there. I want us to declare that non-free firmware is not free, regardless of whether it's stored in a ROM chip on a device or on a general-purpose storage medium. And I want to state, personally, that in my opinion, using non-free firmware that's installed inside a ROM chip on a device is *not* a better situation than having it on the general-purpose storage of the computer in which it's mounted -- because the latter means you can, theoretically, replace that firmware with actually free firmware. If the non-free firmware is installed in a ROM chip, you can't. I wrote a blog post that explains my position (and frustration with the FSF in this context) a bit better (I hope): https://grep.be/blog/en/computer/cluebat/On_Free_Software_Hardware_Firmware/ (*) I realize that this is not an accurate representation of the FSF's position and arguments, but it *is* an accurate representation of *my opinion* of what the FSF's position naturally leads to. -- "I never had a C in history!" "Yeah, but there was so much less of it when you were my age!" -- Joe Brockmeier recounting a conversation with his father, cfgmgmtcamp 2026, Ghent
