In Debian they put the issue of providing proprietary firmware to a vote
At the end of April this year, we share here on the blog the news about an initiative to rethink Debian's attitude towards shipping proprietary firmware and now several weeks later the Debian project has announced a general resolution vote (GR) by the developers of the project on the subject of provide proprietary firmware as part of the official installation images and live compilations.
The discussion phase of the points put to the vote will last until September 2, after which the collection of votes will begin. There are around 1000 developers involved in the maintenance of Debian packages and infrastructure that have voting rights.
Recently, hardware manufacturers have increasingly resorted to using external firmware loaded by the operating system, rather than supplying firmware in the permanent memory of the devices themselves. This external firmware is required by many modern graphics, sound, and network adapters.
At the same time, the question of how the provision of proprietary firmware correlates with the requirement to ship only free software in major Debian builds is ambiguous, since firmware runs on hardware devices, not the system, and refers to the hardware.
Modern computers, even equipped with completely free distributions, run firmware embedded in the hardware. The only difference is that the operating system loads part of the firmware, while others are already installed in ROM or Flash memory.
Until now, the proprietary firmware has not been included in the official Debian installation images and has been shipped in a separate non-free repository.
Installation builds with proprietary firmware have the status of unofficial and are distributed separately, leading to confusion and creating difficulties for users, since in many cases full operation of modern equipment can only be achieved after installing proprietary firmware. Unofficial builds with proprietary firmware are prepared and maintained by the Debian project, which requires additional expenditure of resources to create, test, and host unofficial builds that duplicate official ones.
A situation has arisen where unofficial builds are more preferable for the user if he wants to achieve normal support for his computer, and installing the recommended official builds often leads to hardware support issues.
In addition, the use of unofficial builds interferes with the ideal of providing only open source software and, without knowing it, it leads to the popularization of proprietary software, since the user, along with the firmware, also receives a non-free repository connected to other non-free ones. software.
To solve the problem of activating the non-free repository for users in the case of using non-free firmware, it is proposed to separate the proprietary firmware from the free repository into a separate non-free firmware component and ship it separately without requiring activation of the non-free repository. Regarding the provision of proprietary firmware in the installation assemblies, three options for changes are put to the vote:
- Include non-free firmware packages on official installation media. A new installation image containing non-free firmware will be shipped instead of an image containing only free software. If you have hardware that requires external firmware, use of the required proprietary firmware will be enabled by default. At the same time, at the boot stage, a setting will be added that will allow you to completely disable the use of non-free firmware. In order for the user to make an informed decision, the installer will explicitly separate free and non-free firmware, and display information about what type of firmware will be loaded. After installation on the system, it is proposed by default to add a non-free firmware repository to the sources.list file
- Prepare an installation image with non-free firmware as described in point 1, but send it separately and not instead of an image containing only free software. It is proposed to make the new installation image with non-free firmware official, but to continue sending the old version of the official image that does not include proprietary firmware. To make it easier for beginners to discover, the image with the firmware will be displayed in a more prominent place. An image without firmware will also be offered on the same page with the downloads, but with a lower priority.
- Allow the Debian project to create a separate installation image that includes packages from the non-free section, which will be available for download in addition to the installation image that contains only free software. The download will be organized in such a way that the user is informed before the download begins which of the images contains only free software.
Finally, if you are interested in being able to know more about it, you can consult the details in the following link.