[throwaway7767]

I agree 100% with the stance of not distributing blobs.

But you can put it on the user to provide it. A lot of linux distros have gone this route, if you want to boot debian on RPi you either need to create the FAT partition and put the blobs there yourself, or fetch a third-party image which includes them.

[wolfgke]

That's the mentality difference between mainstream GNU/Linux distributions (though Richard Stallman considers them as unethical and only endorses 100% free software distributions, such as Trisquel GNU/Linux (cf. [1])) and OpenBSD (for the OpenBSD mentality cf. [2]).

[1] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

[2] http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#39