Wouter Verhelst <[email protected]> writes: > I agree that it's premature for Debian to recommend any sort of free > hardware at present, and that the amount of stuff we can do to promote > free hardware and firmware is limited at present. That doesn't mean that > there's absolutely nothing we could do; as and when opportunities > present themselves, we should do what we can. This will be limited > though.
Yes. To try to make this somewhat productive, I will offer one positive suggestion: If there are people who are willing to do the work to create images designed explicitly for the free hardware movement, that are intentionally pushing the boundaries of what software support can be dropped if one is running the most free hardware available, I personally have no objection to seeing a pure blend created for that purpose. I only object to the name. The alternative I'd offer is the Debian for Libre Hardware, or some variation on that. I think adding the word "hardware" avoids the ambiguity and other implications, and indicates that the purpose of the blend is to support the free (libre) hardware movement. (As other people have pointed out, I think the primary obstacle is enough people to do the work, not the name, given that the advocacy benefits of having a dedicated pure blend that has no additional capabilities over baseline Debian are somewhat unclear. But I can't help with the work and maybe can at least help with the name.) > Exactly. I get a sense that you and I are largely aligned on this. Yes. > One thing that I think we can and should do, though, is push back on the > narrative that, just because we don't agree with how the FSF is trying > to tackle the non-free firmware issue, we are therefore morally > deficient and are not properly supporting the cause of free software. > The issue of non-free firmware is multifaceted, and while the FSF has > one position (which I can kind of understand if I squint sideways while > drunk), I don't think it's the only valid option. Because the FSF lists > us as a distribution they do not support, we do occasionally get > well-meaning people who want to "fix" Debian, not realising that the > problem is not one of lack of good-will, but rather a fundamental > disagreement with the FSF. I think it would be good if we had an > explanation of why we do what we do that we could point such people to. If we can agree on a statement without wasting a bunch of our time, that's great, but it should be a statement that we make to our own users on our own terms, and not some sort of debate with the current leadership of the Free Software Foundation. The recent threads from Alexandre Oliva on libc-alpha are, uh, illuminating. To a large extent, the effect of these arguments is to waste our time on divisive nonsense that does nothing to improve Debian or advance free software, and I think it's more important to resist being dragged into pointless ideological hair-splitting than it is to try to defend our reputation. My guess is that Debian already has a much better reputation than the Free Software Foundation does today, and it may be to our benefit to just ignore them when they try to use us as a way of gaining publicity. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
