Hi, On 3/25/26 5:10 AM, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
This is very nice when the interests of our users and of the free software community are aligned. But sometimes they aren't. And we probably have at least some users who care a lot more about how well Debian works for them, than about free software.
I'd argue that long-term, the interests of our users and of the free software community are always aligned because only free software can ensure that our users' needs will also be met in the future.
The various nVidia graphics cards I have collected over the years have slowly fallen out of support by the non-free drivers, but they are still perfectly good cards -- so as a user, I rely on the free software community after vendor support has run out.
Pretty much any argument that Debian needs to ship the proprietary drivers because "users are a priority" has focused only on the short term, where we have full vendor support. This works only as long as there are some greybearded free software zealots that reject the most convenient option, and instead implement something that can be supported by the community and is not beholden to any single external entity whose goals align with the interests of neither our users nor the free software community.
That is another balance we must strike in the project, so this is kind of an extension to the question: should Debian invest resources (manpower, money, publicity, ...) into things that do not provide a short term benefit, but ensure the long term viability of the free software ecosystem, or is that outside our wheelhouse?
For example, are we content with the "user-friendly" approach of Microsoft signing our secure boot shim, or do we want to join a lobbying effort to require user manageable SB keys in ARM64 firmware?
Sometimes non-free tools, or infrastructure clearly based on non-free software, can help us make Debian better for our users.
That is a view that assumes that users are consumers. Some of them are, but for the longevity of the free software ecosystem, we need to turn some of these users into contributors, and an important aspect of that is to give them access to tooling for experimentation.
Pretty much all of the older developers started out by installing a compiler and experimenting without a clear direction.
Any non-free tools or infrastructure we have, is however available only for the particular purpose of improving something in Debian, and we cannot make it available to users, so we really need to be careful to not accidentally create an additional barrier to entry here.
If a tool is useful, a free software version should be made. Alleviating the immediate need for such a tool makes sure that the free software version will be made only if enough greybearded free software zealots come together to build it.
It would be nice if we could have a free software community that is not entirely reliant on the greybeards. A bit of outreach and diversity might help here -- my feeling is that the western hemisphere nerds have become a bit too complacent lately in assuming the good will of corporations ensuring their continued access to generic computing.
Simon
