Debian votes to include proprietary firmware, amends social contract

It's an accurate headline. The firmware under quesiton was NOT included before.

Without extra explanation, "Debian" usually refers to the main section. If the headline is misleading in any way, it's because it implies inclusion into main.

But I think the discussion is old and well known enough for it to not confuse anybody interested on the subject.

Depending on the design of the hardware, you can limit its capabilities and e.g. prevent it from doing arbitrary read/write on RAM.

https://www.pine64.org/2020/01/24/setting-the-record-straigh...

Yes, that's called a "peripheral" and there are many of them. From a software freedom and security perspective, a peripheral that gets its firmware loaded by a Free host is basically the same [0] as a peripheral that has its firmware stored in flash. The FSF chose an ultimately weird stance based on a copyright perspective [1], but it's time to move forward.

In an ideal world, all peripherals (all devices) would also be running Free software. But we're not in that world, so we've got to eek out the Free domains we can, and isolate the non-free parts through well defined interfaces ... and additionally in this world of assumed ubiquitous connectivity, by denying them unfettered Internet access.

[0] Flash is actually worse if you're sharing that peripheral with an untrustable host, since the firmware can be changed without your consent, or frozen against your desires. Whereas loading a stateless peripheral from the host chooses the specific firmware image every time.

[1] It's cool to be able to definitively say "this whole installation image is redistributable purely under Free licenses", but I'd say it's not the most important thing for user empowerment.

"No"? Are backronyms somehow illegitimate? A term can be a backronym and also, over forty years later, be considered generally accepted parlance.

That backronym already exists longer now than the non-acronym BLOB term existed before, though.

The big pain, historically, has been network device drivers.

Ubuntu does more or less does this. But the crucial step is having a checkbox in the installer to install the non-free drivers (that are shipped in the installation media). Otherwise you might have a computer with linux but no easy way to get a driver for your wifi chip to it.

One issue with that strategy is accessibility; e.g. a case that was actually cited at the onset of the discussion that lead to the vote are blind users that need specific firmware to use their audio interface, without which they simply cannot use the installer

Yes, but I suspect that the vast majority of users would find this annoying.

Back in the day when I was playing with Slackware, it would have been interesting and I wouldn't have minded in the least.

But these days, if I'm installing a distro, it's because I'm being paid to do a job. And that job has nothing to do with the distro itself: that's just a hopefully minor step along the path. The fewer "just go do this one little thing" speedbumps I encounter, the better. Or I start to get frustrated and irritated and wonder if there isn't an easier way.

Some hardware firmware is a binary blob because THERE IS NO KNOWN WAY TO COMPILE IT.

Certain chips are manufactured with an initialization code sequence that is generated very similarly to how an FPGA floor planning works.

It should be made clear this Debian Vote is to include Proprietary Firmware in the installer so it is possible for new users to install and try Linux. If it's not in the installer, new users just perceive that free software / Linux just doesn't work at all. That doesn't help anyone.

> The included firmware binaries will normally be enabled by default where the system determines that they are required, but where possible we will include ways for users to disable this at boot

https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/vote_003

Lets hope so, but it doesn't look like to me, reading the proposal Maybe it is a matter of interpretation

Hey, ploum, merci pour ces annees de plume et code francophone.

On my side, I definitly kept ubuntu because that was the only distro that ran on my hardware on first try.

I should not have implied that ubuntu would not have been launched, but rather that the story would have went very differently IMO.

It's even embedded in the original tagline: "Linux for human beings"

Ubuntu's killer feature early on, for me, was picking the obviously correct defaults. No, I don't want Gnome or KDE's stupid browser, I want(ed) Firefox. A whole bunch of little choices like that, that meant I could just hit "install" without modifying anything or choosing any packages and get a desktop set up about the same way I'd have set up Debian, after a bunch of faffing about.

Debian left a huge opening, and Ubuntu went right through it. Good for them — and us.

True, that wasn't precisely stated. I honestly believe that these blobs wouldn't need to be proprietary.

I work on proprietary code for embedded systems too and we don't release the source either. But if it were leaked there is not really a threat to our intellectual property. Maybe the main benefit really is security through obscurity. We don't do general hardware though and it wouldn't be of much interest, but it would be nice to get manufacturers to open up here. Not even the source for the blobs, but some documentation to interface the firmware perhaps.

Sure, it is always some work if you release something to the public or maybe parts of your software need licences themselves, but if possible I would expect this to net secondary benefits for the manufacturers. If people know your hardware, they might use it in their applications as well...

Just getting manufacturers here to open up would still be nice and I believe they could benefit as well.

...because one of the letters against Stallman stopped accepting signatures at three thousand people, but the "pro" Stallman letter never did. It included sixty open-source organizations were among those three thousand individuals. SUSE, Mozilla, GNOME, Creative Commons, X.org, etc. The point was made. A huge number of people and organizations wanted Stallman gone.

Stallman literally said a sex-trafficked child wasn't a "rape victim", and this isn't the first time he's espoused, on technical mailing lists, that golly, 'age is just a number' when it comes to children having sex with adults. He's an infamous serial sexual harasser - for decades. Threatening to kill himself if women won't date him, hosting barely-clothed "cuddle puddles" on the bare mattress in his office at MIT, and women in his office building stuffing their offices full of house plants because Stallman was known to hate them, and it was the only thing that would make him leave women alone.

When Redhat and others pulled funding, the board was clear they weren't interested in prudent governance of the organization, but solely about petulantly supporting their geek deity. His refusal to step down, and the board's refusal to remove him, irreparably harmed their reputation and finances.