[Jedd]

> I think it's an over-zealous position from Debian not to redistribute firmware. Even systems that are very strict about licensing, like OpenBSD, redistribute firmware, because they have some common sense.

OTOH I believe it's a position fully aligned with their ethical standpoint. Equating common sense with your personal preference isn't very gracious.

If you want something that's less zealous about respecting (and eschewing) stupid licensing, but is more zealous about randomly upgrading all your software packages unexpectedly, there's always Ubuntu.

[pnako]

I don't see how it aligns with their ethical standpoint. Firmware is just a blob you load into the device. The alternative is to have it already burned into ROM.

What exactly do you achieve by refusing to load it? Are you more free in one case and not the other?

[Jedd]

If you feel it could be better documented than:

https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware

you could perhaps offer to update that page to remove the ambiguities you believe exist.

[pnako]

That page does not really offer any explanation.

For all intents and purposes, firmware is like a key or a password you must supply to the device to make it work. The driver, which is indeed open-source, just says: "here, device, is the firmware you need". That's it. You are not achieving anything useful at all by making people go through some ceremony to download it separately. Maybe they just want to send the signal that people should buy devices where the firmware is already burned into ROM or ASIC or whatever?

[Jedd]

This is not true.

Firmware is typically copyrighted, large, obfuscated, and executable on your system.

A password is a string that you can examine and offers no intrinsic threat - either exploit, or legal.

As per the link I provided to you, Debian's policy is that free firmware are shipped in the distribution -- non-free firmware requires you add the 'non-free' and/or 'contrib' parameters to your repository lists.

There is no need to wildly speculate about the motivations of the Debian team -- eg 'send a signal people should buy certain devices' -- when their motivation is explicitly stated.

The DFSG dictates non-free software will not part of the standard distribution. But they've made it easy to pull those files in (as above) via a one word addition to one line of your sources.list file.