Re: regarding https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/vote_003
On Tue, Nov 01, 2022 at 12:01:42PM +0000, Wim Bertels wrote:
> Hello,
>
> first of all, thank you for all the good work!
>
Hello Wim,
Thank you for appreciating that Debian does good work.
> personally, i am disappointed with this change,
> unless i misunderstand the voted outcome,
> the choice has been made to put convenience
> before the clear separation of closed and open software;
> something Debian has been doing very well,
> what makes it stand apart from other linux distributions
>
Other distributions do things differently, obviously. Many of them include
at least firmware by default without necessarily telling users up front.
For example - https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/license-approval/
which explicitly lists why firmware is included in Fedora.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Firmware lists Ubuntu polices - non-free
firmware packages are not installed by default.
As you note, there has been a Debian General Resolution (GR) on this recently.
This will change the Debian policy for the upcoming Debian 12 (Bookworm)
release. The GR specifically said that there will be one installer to include
non-free firmware on the image. This does not absolutely preclude the continued
production of a fully free image if this is straightforward.
For more on this, see especially: https://blog.einval.com/ for April, September
and October. (Steve is one of the main movers in the Debian media production
team and his blog gives some of the rationale clearly).
He also led a discussion session at Debconf 22 in Kosovo - https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2022/DebConf22/debconf22-199-fixing-the-firmware-mess.webm.
There are also the significant discussions here on debian-devel and also on
debian-vote mailing lists but these are much harder to navigate and make
sense of.
The situation has changed very significantly since 2010. It is often very
difficult to install Debian without firmware, especially if you have no
Ethernet connectivity - recent laptops in particular have problems with this.
We also have the situation where signed drivers are necessary to get audio
working *at all* on some hardware. This puts Debian out of reach of visually
impaired users since there is no way to install with the speech installer
if you can't hear it. That's a major accessibility issue for a subset of
our users.
The plan is to modify the Debian installation scripts. Firmware will be
loaded by default - allowing Wifi and sound to work initially - but the
user will be offered the option to back out and remove these. That's
effectively the same as a fully libre installer but offering users the
free choice. Separately, a new area of the Debian archive has been created:
non-free-firmware. Because there were some differences of opinion as
to whether this required a change to the Debian Social Contract, this was
put to the vote. The Debian developers voted to change the Social Contract
to make the firmware changes with the requisite majority though the
margins were small on particular options of the vote.
> i think this is an important reason for many debian users
>
> for example in the past:
> https://www.debian.org/News/2010/20101215
> http://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/debian_frees_kernel_again/
>
> i hope future installers will have an easy granular opt-in (or opt-out)
> of proprietary software (on any level, eg including microcode, kernel,
> drivers,..), so that a user can easily choose to have a open system
> with closed source
>
The opt-out will certainly apply to non-free-firmware. Non-free-firmware
will not necessarily include all the drivers available in current Debian
non-free - hence the segmentation of the archive into firmware and "not
firmware" for what is currently in non-free. This will only apply from the
installer for Debian 12 (Bookworm) whenever this is released. This does
*not* yet apply to the current release which is Debian 11.
(Assuming that you mean without closed source above).
> mvg,
> Wim
>
With every good wish, as ever,
Andy Cater
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