Re: Free Software DVD contains non-free firmware

Philip Hands <[email protected]> Tue, 29 Aug 2023 10:05:55 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.cd
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Birzhan Amirov <[email protected]> writes:

> I just want to use this chance to thank the entire Debian Images Team for
> many years of releasing DVDs that actually had 0 bytes of closed-source
> code.
> I have been following the project since "Jessie", and always admired your
> strict and puristic approach.
> Allow me to wish you the best of luck growing your user base.

If you actually want the level of purity-over-practicality that your
mail suggests, people have been providing it long before you took an
interest in Debian -- the FSF keeps a list of candidates:

  https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

[ Oh, I see gNewSense is dead :-/ , and Trisquel is now (... erm, since
  2007 ... obviously wasn't paying attention) based on Ubuntu, which
  doesn't seem like the most obvious way of doing that, but whatever. ]

and while the FSF now criticises Debian primarily on the basis of
this (IMO rather minor) change in installer policy:

  https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#Debian

they've always been critical of Debian, for pretty-much exactly the same
reason as this policy change occurred -- a willingness to let users
obtain a working Debian system by providing them with the chance to get
hold of non-free software as well as Debian, if that's their only choice:

  https://web.archive.org/web/20220211101539/https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#Debian
  
so if you were expecting FSF levels of purity[1], then you probably haven't
been paying close enough attention from the start.

While looking at the FSF site, I noticed this somewhat amusing method
for reconciling these two stances:

  https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/install-fest-devil.html

but I'm afraid I've no idea how one could implement something equivalent
in the medium of downloadable images.

I'm sure if we had a tool for converting "+firmware" to "pure" images,
we'd be publishing the checksums to the "pure" result, and making them
easy to get for those that prefer them, but nobody's yet produced such a
tool.

It really just needs someone to care enough to maintain it (or pay
someone else to do so).

I don't think we'd go back to the situation where we somehow hide the
"+firmware" images though, because we've acknowledged that that is
effectively an abuse of our users, so I would expect the FSF to be
almost exactly as grumpy even if "pure" images were easily available.

Cheers, Phil.

[1] of course, the FSF distributes documentation that is non-free by
Debian's definition (in the form of GFDL-with-immutable-sections), so
other forms of purity are also available :-)
-- 
Philip Hands -- https://hands.com/~phil
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