Simon Josefsson <si...@josefsson.org> writes: > Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> writes:
>> I think what you're missing is that this changed about ten or fifteen >> years ago. I can now buy a new off-the-shelf computer and run Debian on >> it *immediately* because Linux now supports modern hardware and you don't >> have to run ancient gear. > Do you mean install Debian using our non-free installer? Yes. I've had to use the non-free installer for every system I've installed Debian on in the last ten years, and I have had to use at least some non-free packages on nearly every system I have used Debian on since I started using Debian. Without non-free, I would never have started using Debian in the first place because I literally could not have run it on the computers I owned (by which I mean that a purely free system might in some cases have technically "worked" but not had any graphics or other major problems that would have rendered it unusable for my purposes). > What it seems this vote is about is to go back to the time where a > non-free work is required before you can get to the decent free > environment. This is the only part of your argument that I truly don't understand. It seems like you think that because the installer has the *option* of installing non-free firmware, it is somehow fatally compromised from a free software perspective, and that position doesn't make sense to me. Debian has always had the option of installing non-free software. Many of us have always used it; some of us do not use it. I don't feel like this fundamentally changes if the installer includes non-free firmware (provided, of course, that we are careful about the non-free license terms that we are willing to tolerate in the installer image, something that I completely agree is important). I do, for what it's worth, fully support having a way to tell the installer that you don't want any non-free bits, and I believe that's part of the plan with option A/E. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>