Wouter Verhelst <[email protected]> writes: > 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.
Yes. I want to promote fully free hardware and firmware. However, given that very little hardware that does not require non-free firmware exists at present, I don't believe Debian is all that useful of a vehicle for promoting fully free hardware and firmware at the current stage. That movement is still at the phase of trying to make such hardware and get people to buy it, and Debian is not a hardware company so we cannot contribute to that effort beyond ensuring that Debian supports what hardware does exist. I certainly support the latter effort, and I wish the free hardware movement the best of luck, but it's not mature enough for Debian to, for instance, recommend it to users who expect a normal computing experience. > 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. Precisely. What appears to have happened from my perspective is that some advocates of free software and firmware have decided that the solution to the significant difficulties of making such hardware commercially viable is to lie about other hardware that doesn't meet that criteria but pretends to. And I find that morally offensive, and I'm not interested in seeing Debian support advocacy tactics that are based on lying to our users. Just admit that nearly all hardware that exists today has non-free firmware as part of the hardware design and that, as with the early days of free software, we face a long and uphill struggle to change that, and I am on board and support you. I am fully onboard with embracing *partial* efforts as well; I'm quite happy to celebrate the efforts to get rid of some non-free firmware even though some still remains. Early work here is necessarily going to be partial. But don't, as the saying goes, piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. Don't disable the ability to update non-free firmware and then claim that magically makes the non-free firmware not exist. That's not honest advocacy; that's telling people that they must believe 2 + 2 = 5 for ideological purity reasons. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
