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  • =?UTF-8?Q?Re=3A_Reconsidering_Debian=E2=80=99s_Inclusion_of_Non-Fre?= =

    From Matthias Urlichs@21:1/5 to All on Sun Mar 9 13:40:01 2025
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    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Simon Richter@21:1/5 to Marc Haber on Mon Mar 10 12:40:01 2025
    Hi,

    On 3/10/25 17:52, Marc Haber wrote:

    It is fine to disagree that these are concerns worthy spending time on
    within the Debian project, which is my perception of the vote outcome.

    There are not concerns about spending time. There are no people
    willing to do so.

    This is, however, a long term problem.

    The current state where we have free software drivers for a lot of
    hardware is the result of a lot of people investing a lot of time into
    creating them.

    In the same way, we need to do both: support our current users by
    allowing them to use non-free firmware with their current hardware,
    *and* push for new devices to have free firmware.

    Part of that push is informing users that what we do wrt firmware is best-effort, support for their hardware can be dropped at any point and
    the free software community cannot put them in control of their
    computing experience.

    We're not obligated to validate their questionable choices in buying
    hardware that ships with non-free firmware, or apologize for the bad
    experience they have when upstream changes something they don't like. It
    is not our duty as volunteers to compensate for the shortcomings of
    companies, especially companies that use our volunteer time without compensation -- we're the *free* software community, not the *gratis*
    software community.

    Simon

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Simon Richter@21:1/5 to Andrey Rakhmatullin on Mon Mar 10 13:40:01 2025
    Hi,

    On 3/10/25 20:41, Andrey Rakhmatullin wrote:

    We're not obligated to validate their questionable choices in buying
    hardware that ships with non-free firmware, or apologize for the bad
    experience they have when upstream changes something they don't like.
    It is not our duty as volunteers to compensate for the shortcomings of
    companies, especially companies that use our volunteer time without
    compensation -- we're the *free* software community, not the *gratis*
    software community.

    This is also an old argument. Some rebuttals included "this didn't work
    so far", "good luck getting fully open firmware in sectors where it's literally impossible" and "please don't call things users have no choice
    over "questionable choices"".

    That's my point though: the exact same rebuttals were presented in the
    1990ies about getting drivers under a free license, and yet here we are,
    with excellent driver support for all but a few holdouts that users
    understand to be problematic due to the politics of the vendors.

    We've reached the point where people are shitting on nV for the quality
    of their drivers, and a kernel that has closed-source drivers loaded is "tainted", and the last release in which we shipped ndiswrapper was buster.

    This happened precisely because of free software zealotry. Free firmware
    will happen the same way: by users understanding that non-free offerings
    are inferior because you need to live with all the flaws they have --
    and a large part of that is that the free software community is not
    apologizing for the experiences users have with closed-source drivers.

    Simon

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)