Debian Chooses A Reasonable, Common Sense Solution To Dealing With Non-Free Firmware

[oiaohm]

Can't they just include everything needed on the install media and then let the user decide without loading anything automatically?
I mean how hard could it be to to make all the options in the installer?
I bet some people prefer a clean open-source only install, while others care more about doing whatever is needed or whatever works.

Some of this is mega horrible. Some hardware loading the closed source firmware will be required. Some of your arm64 platforms the closed source firmware is what starts the uboot/grub... that starts up the complete process. So depending on what the firmware some can be left to the user decide from interface other firmware all you can really do is inform the user that the install has had to use a particular closed source firmware because the system was not booting or providing any form of interface without it. Other cases you don't load particular firmware into the system when X time after boot passes the system will just reboot.

The way the Debian statement of change is written is to cover all usage cases.

but where possible we will include ways for users to disable this at boot (boot menu option, kernel command line etc.).

The where possible clause here is because particular systems it will not be possible to have user interface until after you have used the closed source firmware.

When the installer/live system is running we will provide information to the user about what firmware has been loaded (both free and non-free)

This bit is a change when you in the past used the debian installer with included closed source firmware the installer made no mention of the closed or open source firmware that had been loaded.

Thank god we're starting to kick politics out of software, no more "Cult of the Free Software". Now we can start getting rid of those "codes of conducts".

Yeah. It's kind of silly to use such a formal name for things like "Quiet in the Library", "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service", and "We Reserve the Right To Refuse Service" signs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_conduct

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_code

Bad news here "Code of Conduct" or "Ethical Code" document pick one. Please note it absolute pick one. Without having a code of conduct or Ethical code there is the follow problems.
1) Legal liability for anything the organization employees or third parties working with your companies employees could be applied to the organization.
2) Funding in a lot of cases by organizational rules cannot be given to another organization that does not have compatible code. No code is classed as not compatible.

Yes Point 1 is hell of a problem. Code of Conduct or Ethical Code allows legally drawing line in sand. That anything not inside the code of conduct the organization cannot be held accountable for. Yes the Linux kernel code of conduct and so on is drawing these legal liability lines.

If you don't like code of conduct the other option is some other form of Ethical Code.

ssokolow the horrible part here is the formal names bit comes from that non profit and companies do have to be formally registered and there are stack of formal things they need to-do as business to operate safely. This is really the same in most countries with business having do in business work place health and safety stuff where most of it is just to limit legal liability if something goes wrong.

Yes lets say someone losses their cool and tells someone on a mailing list to kill themselves and they do. Without a Code of Conduct or Code of Ethics document saying that its not acceptable the person running the mailing list could be classed as aiding and abetting manslaughter under some countries laws for an organization this could be 10s of millions of dollars down the drain.

For a long time these legal liability problems were ignored and many companies suffered in court over it.

So we have to have a code of conduct/code of ethics.... as some document that limited legal liability. Problem is how to write this document without causing more problems.

I am not saying that Linux kernel code of conduct or other projects code of conduct are perfect. The reality while we have legal systems that happy suing organizations over items that should be individual responsibilities we are stuck with the need for either code of conduct or code of ethics to restrain those legal systems.

Reality I wish this stuff was just politics not in fact legal. Yes how to handle closed source binaries like firmware large percentage of that is legal. The code of conduct or code of ethics stuff is large percentage legal.

Closed source binary firmware here is a fun point since it not open source you cannot audit it what happens if it has a backdoor and you did not inform the user they were using it where does that legal liability land. Yes Debian wanting no closed source firmware made this legal problem simpler to prove due care so remove liability.

Legal liability is the core of the "code of conduct problem" and "everything open source" problem.

Please note the Legal Liability problem gets more complex of course lets say you know that X version of firmware is flawed and that is the firmware on the rom on a card and you don't ship with closed source firmware to replace it(that does address the problem) and you don't inform user that the include firmware is defective are you legally liable if something goes wrong? Do note we don't have test case on this event yet.

BIg part of this is where does individual responsibilities start and end vs the providers responsibilities start and end legally. We don't have the ruling on this stuff. Debian has been very conservative.

[ffs_]

That's a fine approach. Personally I don't really care if it's free or non-free, I need things to work...

[nist]

I totally agree. In my case, non-free firmwares are needed for Debian to be used.

[skeevy420]

Thank god we're starting to kick politics out of software, no more "Cult of the Free Software". Now we can start getting rid of those "codes of conducts".

Ehhhh.....no. And people like me are the reason why. My first instinct was this joke that I'm only posting to prove a point since I don't want to side-rail every thread with nonsense (as much as it might not seem like that's the case):

Love the headline. As kids these days would say "based"

So would this be freebased or non-freebased?

[Waethorn]

But if you want to play a video on a website, Fedora says you can't....

[mulenmar]

Or, and this idea might be shocking enough to make people need to sit down: change the kernel license to something that makes it a violation to require firmware for operation of the hardware.

Make your shit *properly* in the first place instead of rushing everything to market for your biosphere-murdering headlong rush of planned-obsolence hardware, and you won't need firmware.

Remember Cyrix, and why their chips were better performance vs Intel and AMD at a fraction of the price? It was because they were hard silicon, not reconfigurable by micro code. They did just fine until they tried branching into making their own entire computers without the know-how to do so successfully, and so ran out of money to catch up at the end (not that the whole FPU design and Quake thing helped either). They didn't rush to be first to market, either.

GPUs were fine without having encrypted firmware and insufficient info to reimplement then with open source code, too. I still have a Kepler era GPU, a freakin' GT430, which handles h264ified YouTube at 1080p well enough if the Athlon II X2 245 it's paired with isn't clocked too low to feed it... and all because devs were able to make their own driver, with full reclocking support and everything.

But hey, keep buying crippled hardware and letting OEMs make money off it, or letting them make crippled drivers you can't get the security of, and you'll keep *getting* crippled hardware with security issues that can't be fixed.

If only the Talos people would make consumer desktop grade and cost machines of the same openness as their workstation.

So would this be freebased or non-freebased?

Netbased. Open source and runs on everything, but not quickly enough for anyone to give a care about, and having procedures and quality requirements to make everything portable that repels egotistical linbased devs.

[user1]

Or, and this idea might be shocking enough to make people need to sit down: change the kernel license to something that makes it a violation to require firmware for operation of the hardware.

Sorry, but with this kind of mindset, Linux would've been as niche as Haiku/ReactOS/OpenBSD or other half dead OS at worst. Or, it will require proprietary / out of tree blobs for everything at best.

[Vistaus]

But if you want to play a video on a website, Fedora says you can't....

And openSUSE agrees...

[Waethorn]

Remember Cyrix, and why their chips were better performance vs Intel and AMD at a fraction of the price?

No, because it never happened.

[KoenDG]

Just wanna point out, the past tense of "choosing" is "chose" with 1 o.