The key difference in my mind is recoverability. In the server case, the
install is by nature largely automated, and often will fail altogether
if you don't for example have the ability to configure your hard drives.

Perhaps an analogy for the desktop would be to ask the question - what
if a popular, common device that was required for system installation in
a large percentage of cases required a non-free driver to be on the disk
and used by default. We would certainly opt to make that device
installable; consider our approach on phones, where we accept binary
blobs and invest a lot to deliver a free userspace.

I don't think we're crossing a significant new line here. There are many
pieces of no-charge proprietary software we COULD be installing to "make
the product better", but we don't, given our values. In this case, I see
no moral high ground in crippling the install unless someone answered an
ideological question. We often forget how hard it is for new users to
come up to speed - we know all the permutations and combinations and
tradeoffs, most users do not.

Consider also how comfortable we are enabling people to run Ubuntu on
proprietary clouds - where they will never see the code beneath the
code, as it were.

Having said all this, I didn't clarify earlier that this mechanism
should only be used for hardware which has no free driver. We should
always silently select the free driver if such a driver exists, and if
people want to go hunting for a proprietary one, ensure they can find
them in a standard, supportable, upgradeable fashion, but not use it by
default.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1305839

Title:
  FFe: Support for Third Party Driver Installation

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